Where Are the ‘Two American Families’ 30-Plus Years After We Started Filming Them?
Even when Terry Neumann isn’t loading and unloading trailers at the Milwaukee-area warehouse where she works the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, her body aches.
“With all of my physical jobs, my joints, my knees, shoulders, the foot that I fractured – the weather changes and it aches,” Neumann, who is in her early 60s, says in the above excerpt from the new FRONTLINE documentary Two American Families: 1991-2024. “I mean, I hurt every day, but I keep pushing through.”
Neumann has been “pushing through” physically demanding jobs for many years now, trying to keep herself and her family afloat in a changing American economy. She belongs to one of two Milwaukee families — one white, one Black — whose decades-long battles to keep from sliding into poverty are chronicled in Two American Families: 1991-2024, premiering July 23.
When correspondent Bill Moyers and filmmakers Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes first began filming the Neumanns and Stanleys, it was 1991, the families had young kids, and the American economy was in the midst of a seismic shift. Both families’ breadwinners had recently lost well-paying, union manufacturing jobs, and the families were struggling to adapt to a new, service economy where jobs trended toward part-time, lower-wage work.
“When I got laid off, they wanted me to go on welfare, but I could not stand in that line,” the Stanley patriarch, Claude, said in ‘91. “I just said, it’s not me … I got my strength, my health; I’m going to find me a job.”
Jackie, Claude’s wife, shared that determination.
“There’s something that I always say: ‘So a man thinketh, so is he,’” she said at the time. “If I think poverty all the time, I’ll act that way. I can’t afford to talk negative and then allow my children to see me that way, down or depressed.”
The Neumanns grappled with similar dilemmas at the time.
“I don’t like having to go and ask and say, ‘I have no food in the house … Can you help me out?’” Terry Neumann said of going to a food pantry while she and her then-husband, Tony, searched for steady income. “I’d rather be on the giving side than the receiving.”
More than three decades later, Two American Families: 1991-2024 brings the stories of the Neumann and Stanley families, across generations, up to the present. As the two-hour documentary demonstrates, both families have refused to stop striving for financial stability despite upheaval in the economy.
“I won’t give up,” Jackie Stanley, who is working as a real estate agent while entering her 70s and navigating her own health issues, says in the above clip.
Two American Families: 1991-2024 is the fifth installment in a series of widely-praised PBS documentaries following the Neumanns and Stanleys that began with 1992’s Minimum Wages: The New Economy, and continued with three more films — a 1995 collaboration with FRONTLINE called Living on the Edge, a 2000 PBS special called Surviving the Good Times and the 2013 FRONTLINE documentary Two American Families. The New Yorker said that the latter film would “take its place among the central documents of our time,” and Variety wrote that “it demands to be seen and discussed.”
Spanning six presidential administrations, Two American Families: 1991-2024 is a portrait of perseverance that raises unsettling questions about the shifting nature of the American economy, the impact on people struggling to make a living, and the shrinking of the middle class as tax cuts and other government policies have made the wealthy richer.
It’s a rare and profound longitudinal look at two families who are still working, in the words of Moyers, “in an economy that long ago stopped working for them.”
Says Terry Neumann, who is now a great-grandmother, in the above excerpt, “If our wages get raised, then everything else goes up, gas goes up, groceries goes up.”
“There is,” she adds, “no wiggle room for anything.”
For the full story on how the elder Neumanns and Stanleys, as well as their children and their grandchildren, are faring today, watch Two American Families: 1991-2024. The two-hour documentary special will be available to watch in full at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS App starting July 23, 2024, at 7/6c. It will premiere on PBS stations (check local listings) and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel at 10/9c and will also be available on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. Two American Families: 1991-2024 is a FRONTLINE production with Okapi Productions LLC and Public Affairs Television, Inc. in association with Left/Right Docs. Produced and directed by Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes. The co-producer is Andrew Fredericks. Written by Kathleen Hughes. The correspondent is Bill Moyers. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
