Social Class

Social Class. Americans have long cherished a belief in the essential classlessness of their society. While acknowledging large inequalities of wealth and income, they have characteristically attached little significance to social class either as a source of personal identity or as a fundamental aspect of social order, and have insisted upon the instability and permeability of such class boundaries as do exist. Indeed, the practice of egalitarian democracy in an open and “classless” society constitutes the core of American exceptionalism. The reality of American social relations, however, is more complex, combining, in different ways in different eras, both fluidity and egalitarianism on the one hand and structured social hierarchy on the other.

Social Hierarchy in Early America.

The process of colonial settlement, and the conditions of the first colonial societies, altered the practice of social hierarchy among Europeans in America. Those who settled in British North America included very few titled aristocrats (those nobles who did migrate to America tended not to remain), relatively few gentry and rich townspeople and an apparently small number of the very poor. Hence, Anglo‐American society began with a disproportionately large number of people from the middling ranks of British society, and this flattening of the social structure was quickly reinforced by a rudimentary economy and by the policy, prevalent in all colonies in varying degrees, of distributing land widely among settlers. In their physical isolation from the mother country, moreover, non‐noble colonial leaders were able to establish and expand political institutions that enjoyed increasing autonomy from royal and aristocratic authority, thereby loosening a connection between social status and political power that underpinned the English aristocracy.

These conditions reduced social hierarchy, but by no means eliminated it. European settlers in the new world came from highly unequal societies in which social hierarchy was deeply inscribed in culture and daily life, and such patterns of belief and practice were not easily shed. In all the colonies, distinctions between “better sorts,” “middling sorts,” and “meaner sorts” of people remained central to conceptions of social order, and no colony attempted to place society on a formally egalitarian basis. Social differences, furthermore, did not decrease, but rather increased over time, as a developing economy provided greater opportunities for the accumulation of individual fortunes, and as wars and economic dislocations increased the numbers of Americans who were poor or near the margins of poverty. (The forced migration of Africans introduced another category of poor Americans, but slaves did not enter society in the same way as the free population, and were considered apart from the developing social system.) Particularly after the middle of the eighteenth century, families controlling the larger southern tobacco and rice plantations, and the more successful merchants of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and other port towns, had the means to build and furnish spacious and elegant homes, purchase carriages and fine clothes, commission family portraits, send their children to colleges and on European tours, and in other ways imitate the genteel lifestyle flourishing in Georgian England. Simultaneously, in the larger towns at least, the poor grew more numerous, as did the middling folk, especially small‐scale artisans, who were less assured than in former times of a stable subsistence. By the 1760s, in Philadelphia and Boston, the wealthiest tenth owned nearly two‐thirds of the assets tabulated on local tax records (their percentage share of untaxed wealth was no doubt higher), while the number qualifying for poor relief could amount to as many as one in six of the population. Poverty among European Americans was probably not as prevalent elsewhere in the colonies, but in the plantation South the wealth share of large planters was as great as that of the urban merchants.

Increasing inequalities enabled wealthier Americans to claim the deference of “middling” and “meaner” sorts, with respect to both social superiority and political authority. In this sense, American “better sorts” imitated their counterparts in the mother country, who made much of ancient traditions of patronage and clientage between the great and the small. This tradition (in some senses an “invented tradition,” less ancient than some gentry tried to assert) was weaker in America, and more vulnerable to popular resistance, but it provided the basic pattern of social and political relations. In face‐to‐face daily encounters, greater and lesser social worth manifested itself not so much as categorical “classes,” horizontally layered according to wealth, lifestyle, social exclusivity, or standing within the agricultural and commercial economy, as vertically understood “ranks” that emphasized the superiority and inferiority of specific persons within known communities. Traditional understandings of hierarchy, and of the rights and responsibilities of superiors and inferiors, underlay the daily intermingling of people of differing ranks. Rank was reinforced by the tacit understanding that these relations would remain in some respects reciprocal, the lesser respecting the status and authority of the greater, the greater respecting and protecting the rights of the lesser.

This system of distinctions worked imperfectly as the imperial crisis evolved into the American struggle for independence. Although wealthy merchants and planters were conspicuous leaders in this struggle, the Revolutionary War unleashed democratizing forces that eventually destroyed the deferential system of social and political relations. Although the corrosion of deference took a half‐century and more, it resulted in a more democratic ideology and political system and a society that Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America would characterize as at once massive and boundless, remarkably free from the restraints of the old aristocratic order. It was in the era of so‐called “Jacksonian Democracy” that the American self‐image of a nation of free and equal strivers was fashioned as a more or less official ideology.

Social Class in the Urban‐Industrial Era.

Simultaneously, however, new forms of social distinction arose as industrialization and urbanization transformed the craft shops of an earlier era into a complex mix of factories, small shops, and domestic sweatshops. As early as the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, some workers complained of new modes of production, identifying themselves (in mechanics’ newspapers, at least) as an exploited “working class.” This identity, if exaggerated at first for rhetorical effect, was grounded in real changes that continued to alter the economic and social circumstances of workers. The de‐skilling subdivision of tasks in many trades, preceding or accompanying the introduction of machinery into the production process, opened many industrial jobs to inexperienced “green hands,” and threatened the livelihood and status of skilled craftworkers, driving many into workingmen's organizations that for the first time excluded employing masters. Larger, more heavily capitalized workshops and factories threatened these workers’ prospects of ever becoming masters of their own shops, perpetuating their status as wage earners and further loosening the craftsman's claim to middling status. Larger workplaces also loosened the connection between work and domestic life, driving large numbers of workers for the first time into crowded and shabby urban neighborhoods easily perceived as “working class.” These neighborhoods reflected the fact that most manual workers were not experiencing the rising per capita incomes that flowed to other groups. By the mid–nineteenth century, the well‐grounded perception of an American working class contradicted the ideology of classlessness.

So, too, did the perception of other emerging classes, which in some ways were products of the same forces. As manual work increasingly aligned with wage employment in an industrializing economy, nonmanual work (work with one's “head” rather than with one's “hands”) aligned with business ownership and new forms of salaried employment. By the second half of the century, the distinction between a manual, wage‐earning working class and a nonmanual, salaried, and profit‐making middle class became quite sharp. Diverging living standards and living spaces underscored the distinction. Workers and the nonmanual middle class had come to live quite different and separate lives, especially in the city, but to some extent also in smaller towns and in the countryside, as middle‐class styles spread outward to shape the social aspirations of business and farm proprietors in rural America.

Urban middle‐class styles (and what has been called the “vernacular gentility” of rural American middling folk) imitated the more opulent styles and manners of the wealthy, who nonetheless preserved and even enhanced their distinctiveness as an upper class. The latter term, indeed, applies with greater force to later nineteenth‐century elites as older personal relationships between social superiors and inferiors dissolved. Just as middle‐class businessmen and wage‐earning workers separated themselves into class‐defined neighborhoods, institutions, and social worlds, so did the wealthy establish exclusive ways of life on fashionable avenues, in elite clubs, and in clearly defined social circles. Deferential relations did not entirely disappear from nineteenth‐century America, but they played a smaller role in a society increasingly separated by living standards, institutions, and space. After mid‐century, the most significant relation between the wealthy and lesser folk was within an impersonal, mediated, celebrity culture, in which middle‐ and working‐class Americans read and spoke about rich people they would never meet and an exclusive “Society” in which they would never participate. The term “aristocracy” increasingly applied to this upper class was full of irony, since a patronizing aristocracy was exactly what the American upper class had ceased to be.

The late nineteenth century, and perhaps the early years of the twentieth, constitute the high‐water mark of class division in the United States. In 1883 the sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) observed that despite the continuing assertion of classlessness, “we constantly read and hear discussion of social topics in which the existence of social classes is assumed as a simple fact.” In a letter written a few years earlier, the reformer Lydia Maria Child had noted the demarcation of “genteel,” “middle,” and “laboring” classes that “are as much strangers to each other, as if they live in different countries.” Comments such as these summarize the effects of nearly a century of class formation. But changes would soon occur that, while not ending class divisions, would blur the borders between them and give new strength to the idea of a classless America.

The Blurring of Class Lines in the Later Twentieth Century.

Three related twentieth‐century developments obscured the boundary between the working and middle classes, just as the terms “blue collar” and “white collar” were gaining currency as expressions of that boundary. One was the vast expansion of the ranks of low‐level office workers and sales clerks, who earned low salaries (or, in the case of many sales clerks, hourly wages) in jobs that often did not lead to significant promotion or self‐employment. This trend had begun earlier when department stores employed young women as sales clerks, but it expanded significantly after the turn of the century, and extended increasingly to male workers in large stores and corporate offices. Men gained promotion more frequently than women, but no longer was clerkship viewed as an apprenticeship to full‐fledged membership in the business world. By mid‐century, the Marxist sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) could write persuasively in his classic text White Collar (1951) of American office and store workers as a new proletariat, no less regimented, poorly paid, and declassed than manual workers of the previous century.

A second development was the improvement of industrial wages. These were driven upward by increasingly effective labor unions (whose wage bargaining power was enhanced by federal policy after 1935), by the industrial demands of World War II, and perhaps too by the “trickle down” rewards of a booming postwar economy. Real wage gains remained modest, but in conjunction with the expansion of poorly paying white‐collar jobs, they diminished the income gap between the two employment sectors and permitted many blue‐collar workers to live as well as or better than some white‐collar employees. In the later twentieth century, the transfer of numerous jobs from industrial production to the service sector further obscured the historic distinction between manual and nonmanual labor by introducing jobs—from fast‐food servers to computer technicians—not clearly identifiable as one or the other. Not only did blue‐collar and white‐collar incomes overlap, but the categories themselves became more difficult to define and hence served less effectively as markers of social class.

The distinction between the middle and upper classes also became less clear as the twentieth century ended, but for different reasons. Once quite open to public view, upper‐class institutions and social life retreated to more private spaces, where elite family and club life, and even “society” marriages and charity balls, attracted little attention from most Americans. The celebrity once enjoyed by the upper class was largely supplanted by sports and entertainment figures and tabloid celebrities. As the patrician Cleveland Amory suggested in his 1960 book Who Killed Society?, the upper class no longer played a significant role in shaping the aspirations and social perceptions of most Americans.

It might seem, therefore, that by the end of the twentieth century the American social structure had finally confirmed the assertion of classlessness. Public discussion of class during the closing decades of the century commonly distinguished between a broadly inclusive “middle class” and an excluded “underclass” sometimes conflated with racial and ethnic minorities—a distinction perceived more as a failure of public policy than as an integral component of an enduring social class structure. But even apart from the problem of the “underclass,” the concept of an all‐inclusive “middle class” failed to account for continuing patterns of social differentiation. As a new century began, social classes were not as clearly inscribed in the social order as they once had been, but they had by no means disappeared. The boundaries and criteria of class were less clear, but America remained a society of unequals, and the social styles historically associated with the upper, middle, and working classes continued to shape the lives of most Americans within reasonably distinct social spheres.
See also Antebellum Era; Capitalism; Colonial Era; Economic Development; Factory System; Gilded Age; Immigration; Labor Markets; Labor Movements; Mobility; Race and Ethnicity; Slavery; Sociology; Women in the Labor Force; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

Robert S. Lynd and and Helen Merrell Lynd , Middletown, 1929.
William Kornblum , Blue Collar Community, 1974.
Gary B. Nash , The Urban Crucible, 1979.
Frederic Cople Jaher , The Urban Establishment, 1982.
Michael H. Frisch and and Daniel J. Walkowitz , Working‐Class America, 1983.
Stuart M. Blumin , The Emergence of the Middle Class, 1989.
Richard L. Bushman , The Refinement of America, 1992.
Gordon S. Wood , The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1992.
Dennis Gilbert and and Joseph A. Kahl , The American Class Structure, 1993.

Stuart M. Blumin