uncle, and his cousin running the operation across three different locations: Boston, New York, and Norfolk, Virginia, respectively.3
But once the war was over, so was the government largesse, and as Joe Sr. searched for his next venture, he suffered a string of bad luck. Planning to buy a building in downtown Boston and turn it into a furniture store, his business partner absconded with their money. Purchasing an airport and a couple of planes for a crop-dusting business, Joe Sr. struggled to secure contracts, while his cousin, his partner in the venture, squandered what was left of his wartime fortune. His uncle (and financier) pulled his capital. After years of expensive and generous living as a federal defense contractor—hunting pheasant on the weekend and buying dazzling toys for his infant son—Joe Sr. and the family, now mired in debt, moved in with Jean’s parents in Scranton only three years after the end of the war.4
Though the young Biden and his three siblings spent their earliest years in that crowded but loving house in Scranton, their father’s employment prospects would force the family to relocate several times. They first moved when Biden was ten to the outskirts of Wilmington, where Joe Sr. had been commuting every day—a nearly three-hundred-mile round trip. In 1955, they moved to Mayfield, a suburb of Wilmington populated by employees of DuPont, the family and company that had shaped and controlled Delaware’s politics and economy for more than a century.5
“America seemed to be remaking itself for our postwar generation,” Biden later recalled. “There were new houses, new schools, new car models, new gadgets, new televisions, and new television shows with people who looked just like us.”6
The Bidens benefited from this beyond just their father’s wartime business success. The suburban dream they were entering was the direct outcome of the postwar New Deal order, as the federal government subsidized a construction boom concentrated in the suburbs. And just as the US military would in essence become the largest government jobs program in the decades ahead, indirectly subsidizing the conservative activists in places like Orange County who leveraged this comfort to get the government off their backs, the government’s fingerprints were wiped just clean enough from all this to convince postwar suburban America it had been a happy accident.7
But that dream was not all hunky-dory. Although Delaware, a former slave state that waited until 1901 to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, had a long history of racism, Biden would later explain that he “had just assumed everyone treated everyone fairly” until he worked as a lifeguard on the predominantly black east side of town during his first year of college. While no doubt an exaggeration—he also later told a biographer that he was “always the kid in high school to get into arguments about civil rights”—Biden’s naïveté was entirely plausible given that the government-subsidized postwar housing boom in Delaware and elsewhere was explicitly geared toward ensuring racial segregation, sending affluent whites scurrying for suburban communities that African Americans were excluded from. By 1977, Wilmington’s public schools were 85 percent black, while suburban schools were around 90 percent white.8
The young Biden probably wasn’t aware of just how deep this went. He wouldn’t have known that Delaware’s public schools were explicitly and legally created to be segregated and unequally funded, or that the University of Delaware had only admitted its first black student around the time his family moved to the state. He may well have been oblivious to the way that the state, particularly Wilmington, promoted suburban, mostly middle-class white interests at the expense of inner-city, mostly poorer black ones; that the city’s public housing authority engaged in “urban renewal” and federally subsidized slum clearance that tore down black neighborhoods without replacing them, displacing countless families of color; or how the fiercely contested construction of the I-95 highway through the city in the 1960s did likewise, so that car-owning suburbanites could leapfrog a desolate downtown.9
Biden may not have consciously internalized all this. But the city’s tendency to prioritize predominantly suburban, middle-class interests at the expense of its minority populations would come to embody Biden’s political approach.
From the Middle
Very few politicians come within a heartbeat of the US presidency without a lifetime of plotting out their rise, and Joe Biden was no different. After overcoming a debilitating stutter in childhood—the first in a lifetime of personal setbacks Biden would struggle to overcome—he set his sights on politics, startling those around him with his presidential ambitions.
“It was soon after we met him, before they were even married, before he even got into politics,’” his first father-in-law, Robert Hunter, later recalled. “By God, he came up one day and said he was going to be governor first, and then president of the United States.” When his future mother-in-law asked the college junior the same question, the response was identical: “President.”10
Biden would deny this again and again over the years, always insisting that he started out with no grand ambitions, that he was simply taking things as they came. During one speech in Wilmington, he repeated this claim only for a nun in the audience to produce a sixth-grade essay he’d written about wanting to grow up to be president. And he wasn’t the only one who believed the White House was his destiny. “From the first day I went to work for him, people said [to Biden], ‘You’re going to be president,’” his longtime aide Ted Kaufman later recalled.11
By his own admission, Biden had entered law school because it was the best route to a political career. After graduating, he put politics aside for a while, teaching in the Delaware public school system, serving as an assistant public defender, and working for several Wilmington firms, including his own: Walsh, Monzack and Owens. The “Owens” was John T. Owens, a college classmate who had earlier been deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania and would soon marry Biden’s sister. But the political world was never far away: several of the lawyers Biden was associated with at this time, including Owens, were also prominent local Democrats.12
As a public defender, Biden represented clients in various states of desperation seeing firsthand the frayed line between underclass and criminal. He pled with a judge to go easy on one defendant, a down-on-his-luck fisherman with four kids who had stolen and sold a cow.13 Another, he explained, had been “crazy drunk” and already brain damaged when he killed his roommate.14 The Washington Post would claim in 1975 that Biden had “a largely black, even black-militant clientele” as a lawyer, though it’s unclear how accurate this was, given Biden’s habit of embellishing his civil rights activism and the fact that the article came out at a time when he was especially eager to play up his relationship with the local black community.
A registered independent since the age of 21, Biden was first courted by local Republicans to make a run for office before officially becoming a Democrat in 1969. At only 27, the party tapped him to run for the New Castle County Council the following year, a campaign for which he kept his party affiliation out of promotional material. The district where he was running was overwhelmingly Republican, and the county as a whole was shaped by the politics of suburban white flight: while its population increased fourfold between 1940 and 1980, Wilmington, the county seat, saw its numbers drop by 38 percent. Biden was perhaps the perfect fit. As a former state Democratic Party chairman who observed Biden’s career from the start later recalled, “He had lots of energy and idealism and was always assertive. But to my knowledge, he had no substantive ideology.”15
Biden would later claim that civil rights and Vietnam had prompted his political career. In 1973, however, he told a local paper that a citizens’ campaign against highways had drawn him into politics. He won the council seat partly by railing against unchecked growth and industrial development swallowing up the county’s green spaces and partly by tapping into themes that would prove electorally fruitful in subsequent decades; he complained about the “rapidly deteriorating crime situation in the county”
