Social distinctions have existed inmost societies, such as the orders of the European feudal system or the castes of Indian society, but the modern concept of social class emerged during the nineteenth century. In the classic definition of German political economist Karl Marx, societies are divided into classes based on their socioeconomic status, more particularly, those who own capital (factory owners, for example) and those who do not and must rely on wages for subsistence.

Social Classes

In the United States, the high level of social mobility and the high percentage of people owning individual property have sparked a debate over whether there are genuine American social classes at all. Initial immigration came from a relatively narrow social range, mostly craftsmen and peasants from the "middle sort," rich enough to pay for the journey to America but poor enough to have an incentive to do so. Even indentured servants, immigrants placing themselves in voluntary servitude for a period of about five years in exchange for the cost of the trip, gained freedom eventually; furthermore, their number declined after the American Revolution. Only black slaves, disenfranchised and permanently deprived of property ownership, could legitimately be described as a social class.

The peculiar social environment of the frontier, in which opportunities abounded, allowed most white males to experience social mobility, whether upward or downward. The process prevented permanent classes with distinct tastes and ways of life from forming, to the point where the European elite sneered at American nouveaux riches, who had no proper education to match their newfound fortunes. This social hierarchy, based almost solely on wealth acquired by merit, justified the huge income gap that still characterizes American society. A survey reported in the New York Times (26 October 1998) found that in 1994, the 30 percent richest Americans commandeered 55.3 percent of the national wealth, a higher percentage than in any similar industrialized country. Still, income inequality gave rise to only limited social unrest.

Faith in Upward Social Mobility

Despite two famous exceptions, the first years of the Republic were relatively conflict free. From 1786 to 1787, Daniel Shays headed a revolt of several hundred men aimed against foreclosures and high taxes. A military failure, Shays's revolt nevertheless convinced the legislature of Massachusetts to pass a law protecting indebted farmers. In 1799, John Fries launched another revolt in Pennsylvania to free from prison citizens who had refused to pay a new property tax. For the first half of the nineteenth century, many Americans believed in the Jeffersonian ideal of a united, peaceful, egalitarian society of yeomen, or small independent farmers.

Many of the captains of industry who rose to prominence after the Civil War had humble origins. Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, James Fisk, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Cooke, James J. Hill, and Collis Huntington could legitimately claim that they had gone from rags to riches. William Vanderbilt, Edward Harriman, Henry Villard, and Henry Clay Frick were among the few for whom a more privileged background had served as a stepping-stone. Faith in upward social mobility in the late nineteenth century was best exemplified in the popular novels by Horatio Alger, in which young heroes enrich themselves through honesty, hard work, and—in part—luck.

Many of these entrepreneurs, most prominently steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the son and grandson of Scottish blue-collar agitators, devoted part of their wealth to philanthropic causes that helped poor people help themselves. (Carnegie funded public libraries, schools, and museums.) The deserving poor, unable to work because of a crippling injury, also received help, but most of the poor, having failed to succeed in an open social environment, were seen as morally deficient. In England, philosopher Herbert Spencer, inspired by the works of Charles Darwin, compared society to a struggle of species, in which superior individuals became rich while the unfit crowded the lower classes. In The United States, sociologist William Graham Sumner, author of What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1883), argued that societies, like species, improved through unfettered competition. Hence, he concluded, the state should stay out of class conflicts, as these were essential albeit painful steps in the process of natural selection. This view, known as Social Darwinism, was extremely influential among the rich.

The Elusive Threat of Class Conflict

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, a wave of farmer unrest known as populism swept the South, the Midwest, and the Great Plains. Populists protested the ever-diminishing prices of agricultural products. This problem was compounded by the deflationary policies followed by the federal government after the Civil War, characterized most notably by the retirement of wartime banknotes (greenbacks) and the maintenance of a gold standard. The populists also loathed the big corporate monopolies that controlled grain elevators and set train freight rates. They created farmers' associations such as the Grange, founded 1867, and the Farmers' Alliances, established in the 1870s. They also supported the unsuccessful presidential bids of James B. Weaver (1892) and William Jennings Bryan (1896, 1900, 1908). A rising supply of gold resulted in an inflationary trend and populism declined at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Rapid industrialization made some successful entrepreneurs extremely wealthy at the expense of a class of wage earners, often young women and immigrants, living in dire poverty. This chasm raised the specter of class warfare, which the rise of a militant socialist movement in Europe and the death of William McKinley at the hands of the anarchist Leon F. Czolgosz (1901) made more menacing. Progressives warned that the concentration of economic power stifled upward social mobility, an argument widely disseminated by Upton Sinclair's best-selling novel, The Jungle (1906).

On 4 May 1886, police and protesters clashed violently in the Haymarket Riot after the failure of a strike at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago for an eight-hour day. From 11 May to 2 August 1894, a strike originating in the Pullman Palace Car Company near Chicago paralyzed the nation before courts and federal troops stepped in. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies), a radical labor union, was formed in Chicago in 1905.

These episodes of class conflict never altered fundamentally the political landscape. Radical candidates enjoyed only rare local successes, while Socialist candidate Eugene Victor Debs trailed far behind in the presidential elections of 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. The IWW faded away during World War I.

The Great Depression, starting in 1929, resulted in renewed hardships for the working class and for farmers, many of whom lost their land in drought-plagued Midwestern states. Yet even this, the greatest economic cataclysm in U.S. history, had limited consequences. During the Great Depression, membership in the Communist Party rose only from 7,000 in 1930 to a peak of about 90,000 in 1939. In 1930, William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, stated that he opposed unemployment insurance, for it would turn every worker into "a ward of the state."

Inspired by earlier trade unions such as the Knights of Labor (founded 1869), the AFL represented only the elite of the working class, including skilled craftsmen. Yet even the more radical Congress of Industrial Organizations, initiated by United Mineworkers president John L. Lewis in 1935, was hardly a revolutionary organization. The CIO was more confrontational in its tone and more open to blacks and unskilled workers than was the AFL. But despite the rise in union membership and militancy, social legislation—including section 7a of the National Recovery Act (1933) and the Wagner Act (1935), which protected the right of workers to organize—assured that unions would be negotiating partners rather than revolutionary organizations. In 1941, the AFL and the CIO made no-strike pledges for the duration of the war.

The booming postwar economy allowed many blue collars to become middle-class suburban property owners with few reasons to upset the social order. But during the 1960s, liberals argued that a permanently impoverished underclass existed in America, a thesis most famously expounded in Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962). President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the Great Society, whose main goals were racial equality and the eradication of poverty. Aside from banning racial discrimination and protecting the right of African Americans to vote, Great Society legislation of the mid-1960s offered the poor free medical care (Medicaid), enhanced educational opportunities (Elementary and Secondary Education Act), early education (Head Start), subsidized housing (Housing and Community Development Act), and urban renewal projects (Community Action Programs). Still, a sharp racial divide continued to exist in America. Considerable racial separation and a high level of African American poverty persisted. In turn, ameliatory measures such as positive discrimination (affirmative action) and busing created a "white backlash" in some segments of America, particularly the working class, whose previous political apathy could be attributed to the belief in a social system based on merit.

There was also a conservative backlash against welfare policies. Public concern about "welfare queens" (a lower class permanently living off welfare) helped conservative candidates such as Ronald Reagan. In his State of the Union Address in 1996, President William Jefferson Clinton declared that "the era of big government is over" and stricter welfare policies instituted during his presidency marked a return to a traditional conception of American society according to which the lower class is a fluid body whose members should escape their social status through merit and work.

Bibliography

Dawley, Alan. Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Harper and Row, 1984.

Newman, Katherine S. Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

—Philippe R. Girard

Encyclopedia of American History Copyright © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.