"Class is obviously a difficult word," Raymond Williams wrote in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976). Class was a difficult word for Williams "both in its range of meanings and its complexity in that particular meaning where it describes social division." As a word in English, class probably first appeared in a Latin form, classis, during the sixteenth century. Classis was a Roman term for the differences of property among citizens. One mid-seventeenth-century scholar, Williams reports, glossed the term as "an order or distribution of people according to their several Degrees" but restricted the meaning by adding "in Schools (wherein the term is most used)." In 1705 Daniel Defoe remarked, "tis plain the dearness of wages forms our people into more classes than other nations can show." Defoe identified a main force in class formation within early capitalism: the payment of wages for labor. But Defoe referred to an ambiguous plurality of classes, not to a hierarchy based on a division between employers and employed. Class in its modern sense is defined not only by the form of economic subsistence but also by a hierarchical division of labor, privilege, and authority. The formation of classes in America—followed by modern usage of the term "class" to describe them—accelerated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the commencement of the Industrial Revolution in the Atlantic basin. It began earlier, however, and occurred in relation to the historical development of race and gender.
The Division of Society Into Owning and Working Classes
Long before the word "class" gave a label to the status arrangements within industrial capitalism, the conditions that the term would describe were developing. None were more important than the division between a large and growing population that owned nothing but its labor and a much smaller, profit driven population that owned productive property, whether land or tools and shops. Where this process began is a source of continuing debate, but one place to look for some of the earlier developments is early modern England. Beginning in the sixteenth century and stretching into the nineteenth century, a series of enclosure acts in England eliminated the traditional feudal rights of peasant communities to hold large pieces of land in common for general use. The termination of these rights made possible the creation of large private, individual holdings for commercial production. The English state simultaneously expanded its power to compel the dispossessed and mobile commoners to labor either in agriculture or the crafts. Commoners either worked in the new system voluntarily or were treated by the state as criminal vagrants and sentenced to workhouses. In North America, where land was much more widely available, workhouses were less common, but both forced and voluntary labor took contractual forms similar to those practiced in England: craft apprenticeships and agricultural indentures.
The indentured agricultural laborer contracted to work for a number of years for a master, or planter, in exchange for the cost of transport to the British North American colonies, not wages. During the late seventeenth century growers in the Chesapeake Bay region, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean shifted exclusively to enslaved African labor. Through the end of slavery, small planters and their families often worked alongside their handful of enslaved laborers and whites continued to do hired agricultural labor. But agricultural labor in commercial production of tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton became the work of a caste of enslaved workers, distinguishing it from the wage system developing in the crafts. The craft apprentice served a master for a number of years, usually about seven or until maturity, and then became a journeyman who likely earned wages from his master. Journeymen lived with their masters until they married or became skilled enough to complete their own "masterpiece" and open their own shop. The English guilds, which enforced these relationships among craft workers and controlled prices, never crossed the Atlantic. Initially, there were fewer journeymen in craft operations in North America. Masters usually worked for themselves, perhaps with an apprentice or a journeyman. And many of those called masters were really journeymen who simply set up shop for themselves in American cities with few or no craft workers. During the late eighteenth century these masters, like many of their English counterparts, began to enlarge their operations, employing more labor and demanding more from it. These small groups of journeymen who worked together in the shops and lived together in neighborhoods apart from their masters increasingly organized themselves and found cause to strike over wages and hours. Consequently, although master bakers went on strike in New York City in 1741 and master carpenters struck in Savannah, Georgia, in 1746, demanding better prices, it was journeymen carpenters who went on strike in Philadelphia in 1791.
Between 1780 and 1840, the transformation of the craft system into a system of ownership and working classes was perhaps "one of the outstanding triumphs of nineteenth century American capitalism," according to Sean Wilenz (Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 [1984]). It was during this period that the changes in labor practices that were detectable in the eighteenth century suddenly seemed to move more rapidly, encompassing a wider demographic. Master craftsmen and shopkeepers had formed a significant—if uncertainly situated—middling class status, or rank, in the commercial cities of British North America from Boston to Savannah. But by 1815 merchant capitalists dominated some of the craft markets, such as textiles and many in this first middle class of small independent producers could no longer maintain themselves. Some masters, in crafts such as silver smithing, possessed significant wealth, but others endured hard labor and seasons of desperate want for themselves and their families. Many master craftsmen became managers working for capitalist owners who controlled the tools, inventory, and marketing and expected masters to push for the greatest possible productivity for the lowest possible wage. By 1820 New York City had twelve "manufactories" that employed twenty-five or more workers and thirty-five other facilities that employed tenor more workers. Many other masters lost their independence and became wageworkers in these early factories alongside journeymen and apprentices. After about 1820, the rise of stereotyping in printing and sweatshops in clothing and shoes heralded the expansion of mechanized, frenetic, and standardized production.
The emerging class relations of industrialization were broadly impacted by the American Revolution's ideological discourses, which lauded national and individual independence as masculine virtues. Masters who worked crafts that were still not industrialized maintained an independence that could put them in a middling rank, along with small-scale yeoman farmers. This independence was an important source of distinction—or class—and it defined white masculinity while separating it from the status of the enslaved and women, all of whom could not vote and owned little or no property. Even when they organized into citywide craft unions, larger and better organized versions of the eighteenth-century journeymen's combinations, white industrial workers were dependent on insecure employment over which they exercised little control. Class subordination and republican masculinity were contradictory. As both slave labor and wage labor expanded in the early nineteenth century, American workers discovered that "one way to make peace with the latter was to differentiate it sharply from the former," according to David Roediger in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1992). African Americans both enslaved and free were stereotyped by all whites as licentious, lazy, and dangerous by nature, fit only for hard labor and dependence on whites. A model of white masculinity defined itself in terms of protecting against blackness and blacks. In nonslave states, white working-class Republican Boys harassed the free black population of the cities, chasing them from public spaces. Whites produced and eagerly attended blackface minstrel productions, which were stereotyped and distorted representations of black culture. In the slave states, whites of all classes, including workers, helped police the enslaved and protect against insurrection.
As the manufactory owners looked less for skill than for cheap, rapid output, they also participated in altering the economic role of women, creating new class cultures, particularly in the cities. In The North, the unpaid labor of women in the household helped fuel early capital accumulation by consuming and using the ever-expanding "labor-saving" devices produced by the industrial sector and reproducing the laboring population. The famous Lowell Mills in Massachusetts, one example of a regional practice, employed farm girls in factory production for fourteen hours a day at a fraction of the wages paid to men. In The larger cities, such as New York, the outwork system, in which women took wage work home, the low wages it paid, and the difficulty for these dispersed women workers to organize helped fuel a new street culture. Juvenile delinquency, attacks against women, and public intoxication all seemed more prevalent after 1820. Middle-and upper-class men sought prostitutes in the working-class neighborhoods. Workingmen had developed a moralistic and paternal attitude toward the street culture and women's labor exploitation. Middle-and upper-class women, claiming an especially moral status as women of "respectable" classes, discovered a public role in moral reform work within the workers' neighborhoods.
Racial Divisions and Rising Worker Consciousness
In the South, where the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived, most of them were enslaved. Slaves were workers, but racism divided them from "the working class," a phrase that, as in the North, carried an often unspoken association to "white." The degree to which the slave South was capitalist and class conscious continues to be a source of debate. Slavery was principally an agricultural labor system with some feudal qualities, but it was also a source of labor for the crafts and industry. In Charleston, South Carolina, artisans employed or owned enslaved African laborers in the eighteenth century. In the antebellum period the Tredgar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia—the third-largest iron producer in the United States—used slaves for about half of its one-thousand-person labor force. Tredgar's enslaved workers earned wages, mostly for their masters, and worked in every phase of production as founders, colliers, miners, teamsters, and woodchoppers. Slaves were cheap to hire from their masters and could be made to work hard. Racism divided this biracial workforce, making strikes difficult. An unsuccessful strike by white workers at Tredgar in 1847 unsuccessfully demanded the removal of black workers.
Although the Civil War, in a sign of a growing class consciousness, workers formed the first nationwide labor unions and organizations in the United States beginning in the 1860s. In 1877 railroad workers struck after four years of depression in the economy and repeated merciless wage cuts by the railroads, engaging the Pennsylvania militia in a bloody armed confrontation at Pittsburgh and spreading the strike throughout the national rail systems. Another sign of growing class consciousness was the fact that labor organizations grew despite failures such as a massive nationwide strike effort for the eight-hour day in 1886. The Knights of Labor, an early nationwide union, rejected the antebellum model of organizing only skilled white workers and instead organized skilled and unskilled, white and black, reaching possibly one million members, or nearly 10 percent of the American workforce, in 1886. That same year the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was organized by a group of national and regional craft unions. The more massive industrialism became, the more massive the confrontations and workers' organizations became. In 1892 the town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, had only 11,000 residents, but 3,800 of them worked in its twelve mills. When workers in Andrew Carnegie's Homestead mill went on strike that year after his associate, Henry Clay Frick, announced he would not renew the union's contract and would replace all the workers, virtually the whole town, men and women, joined in active support of the walkout. Frick hired several hundred armed soldiers, and after violent armed confrontations with the strikers and towns people, he ultimately succeeded in breaking the strike and the union. The Homestead strike and the use of armed force to break it became common during the early twentieth century and underscored the class divisions within American society.
The movement of European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants and African American migrants into U.S. industries during the years between the 1890s and the 1940s greatly altered the class system. Millions of immigrant workers labored in Chicago factories and Colorado mines alongside southern-born African Americans who moved North in two great migration waves between 1910 and 1940. Both the men and women of these populations worked in industry. In 1910 nearly one-third of working women still labored in domestic service, but the numbers of women in industrial wage labor were increasing. Ten percent of married women worked for wages in 1920, the year women won the right to vote. Women's total employment reached eleven million before World War II, nearly doubling the female workforce.
These changes in the rapidly expanding industrial workforce stimulated a reformation of the middle class, both outside the corporations and within them. Problems and injustices that were of interest to philanthropic gentlemen and ladies in the British colonial, early national, and antebellum periods—orphan rescue, poor relief, and educational reform—became the concern of new intellectuals. This class not only managed the factories and corporations, but also taught in the expanding universities and colleges, administered the growing state bureaucracies, and founded settlement houses to address the poverty of the largely immigrant and working-class urban population. Their approach to social problems remained moralistic and paternal—teaching immigrant women to be "good mothers," for example—but as in the factories, where managers sought to regulate production through "scientific" discipline and efficiency, reformers adopted "scientific" methods, expanding the study of poverty and creating state welfare programs.
The Great Depression and the administrations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt further institutionalized this new middle, bureaucratic class and removed the barriers of violence and law to union organization that employers and state governments had erected. In addition, the Great Depression delegitimized the capitalist class and its system of private corporate benefit programs. These conditions encouraged not only an expanded welfare state but vigorous union organizing: total American union membership tripled between 1932 and 1939, exceeding eight million. By the end of World War II, as many as one-third of American workers were union members. But the growing Cold War ideological tension between the United States and the Soviet Union following World War II fundamentally altered class politics. After nearly a century, that "spectre" that Marx had declared was "haunting Europe" in 1848 seemed to haunt Americans anew: communism, more as a specter than as an actual mass movement, became enmeshed in American racism and class politics. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—later to merge with the AFL—expelled nine unions in 1949 and 1950 because of their refusal to purge communists. The CIO had organized 800,000 southern workers during the war, one-third of them black, but it stagnated under accusations that unions were the leading edge of a communist miscegenation plot to subvert white Christian capitalism. Many workers in the South, North, and West supported the anticommunist campaign. The mainstream of worker consciousness had never been revolutionary; rather it supported the development of a welfare state that protected laborers from the worst vicissitudes of capitalism.
In the later twentieth century, the stall in working-class organization and the relatively higher wages that industrial workers earned, compared to prewar levels, helped spark debate about the reality of class divisions in the United States among the intellectual middle classes. Qualitatively it seemed obvious that class divisions mattered in America: strikes, unions, and police repression of workers all seem to indicate serious class conflict. One Chicago worker in 1940, answering a question about whether there was a working class, expressed a common opinion when he cited class-segregated neighborhoods and social networks:
Hell, brother, you don't have to look far to know there's a workin' class. We may not say so. But look at what we do. Work. Look at who we runaround with and bull with. Workers. Look at where we live. If you can find anybody but workers in my block, I'll eat 'em." (Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 [1990])
In 1940, however, Fortune magazine announced the results of a survey showing that 80 percent of Americans identified themselves as middle class. Fortune took the results as evidence that capitalism, "the American way of life," produced general affluence, not class animosities. Fortune's findings were soon challenged by sociologists who found a majority of Americans identified as working class. Ultimately, however, querying Americans on their self placement within the class system offered few solid conclusions. As study after study tested each others' assumptions, methods, and categories and ended with different conclusions, the Left grew skeptical of the objectivity of sociological surveys and the Right grew skeptical of a putatively leftist academy.
Globalization and a New Class Formation
In 1963 the widely influential English historian E. P. Thompson insisted, in The Making of the English Working Class, that class was not a fixed social structure or a possession of a fixed set of people, hinting that sociology was looking in the wrong direction. Rather, "class" was simply "something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships." With similar logic, two American sociologists argued in the late 1980s that the role of authority and the nature of work have become "central in the capital accumulation process and … the exploitation of the working class" (Reeve Vanneman and Lyn Weber Cannon, The American Perception of Class [1987]). What defines class is not ownership of property or self-identification, but a person's type of labor and ability to control it. The industrial working class had been defined by hourly and insecure wage labor since its formation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And workers built ever-larger organizations—first in shops, then cities, and finally, nationally—to combat this insecurity and its frequent poverty. As the globalization of industrial capitalism picked up pace in the late twentieth century, North American industrial workers watched their multinational employers move their higher-wage jobs overseas, precipitating a new class formation still unfinished at the end of the century.
The first feature of the new class formation was increased poverty and insecurity, but this "flexibility" and "efficiency" in the workforce—as corporate culture described it—yielded only a moderate degree of new militancy from worker organizations in the United States. During the last decades of the twentieth century, actual poverty—the inability to pay for necessities, such as health care and housing—among low-wage workers deepened. Meanwhile, women and minorities continued to be disproportionately represented among the lowest wage earners. The 1990s poverty rate of 13 percent—which incorporated a short-term decline in poverty among minorities—was misleading because it was calculated on the cost of food. While food prices remained more or less stagnant between the 1960s and 2000, rent and health care costs far outpaced inflation, market wage increases, and governmental adjustments in the minimum wage. Even after modest wage growth for low-wage workers during the 1990s, many American workers lived on 1973 wages at 1999 prices. A disproportionate percentage of the working-class poor were nonwhites and the working class remained divided by race, even after the civil rights movement had run its full course. The southern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had tended to address race but not class dynamics within the black community. For all its dramatic successes in expanding democracy in the United States, the urban rebellions of the 1960s could be understood as stemming from the failure of the movement to win effective solutions to economic inequalities. The 1992 rebellion in working-class black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, following the acquittal of police officers in the brutal beating of Rodney King, made plain the depth of continuing frustration in the black working class.
A second feature of the new class formation was the official labor movement's efforts to moderate—not revolutionize—globalization and the race and gender disparities and divisions within the American class system. Unions declared a renewed interest in organizing the unorganized, democratic internal governance, international labor coalitions, antiracism and antisexism efforts, and the mobilization of workers to resist globalization on corporate terms. Alongside church, environmental, and student activists, unions supported local anti-sweatshop and living wage campaigns across the country. A Teamsters strike at the United Parcel Service in 1997 seemed to many to announce a newly assertive working class. And the thousands of union members who protested against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 alongside thousands of students and environmentalists seemed to herald a new activist, militant, mass, and global working-class agenda. The challenge seemed likely to rest in how well the labor movement could address both globalization, with its formation of industrial classes in undeveloped nation-states primarily in the Global South, and the persistent race and gender divisions within the American working class—divisions of wage scales, privileges, and opportunities.
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—James O'Neil Spady
