Status and social class in America

One of the most striking features of class in America is the wide‑spread popular disbelief in its existence. Woodrow Wilson in 1912 observed that Americans like to think that "this is the country where there is no distinction of class, no distinction of social status". To judge from their responses to modern social questionnaires, American attitudes towards class haven't changed much during the past two generations. Americans either continue to assert that classes are almost totally nonexistent in the country, or they insist that they belong to the great middle class. Close scrutiny of the writings of the American political historians reveals that most of them are oblivious to any interconnections between politics and class, while the few who take account of them tend to attribute slight significance to the relationship. Most Americans appear to be convinced that the New World is and always has been different from the Old. The USA is indeed unique in a number of important respects; yet the evidence is abundant that classes, class lines, and distinctions of status do exist and have always existed here, as elsewhere in the world.

Before launching into a discussion of the changing face of the class in America over the course of time, it's necessary to indicate precisely what is meant by the term. Controversy over the meaning of class is inevitable in view of the abstractness and complexity of the concept, its multidimensional components, the imprecision attending evaluation of such ingredients as status and prestige, and the subjectivity involved in ranking even such objective features as occupation and residence.

The families and individuals that constitute a distinctive class are roughly similar in a number of significant respects: their level of wealth; their means of achieving it; the prestige, quality and relative irksomeness of the means; their style of living, including their uses of leisure; their social repute (resting, among other things, on their racial, ethnic, and religious identity); the standing of the social circle within which they move; and the influence and power they command in their own and in the larger American community. There are other definitions of class that are no doubt simpler and easier to work with than the offered one. But the point of a good definition is that it captures the complexity of the phenomenon it purports to describe and explain.

In differentiating the Americans by class, it seems sensible to speak not of capitalists and a working class, but rather of upper, middle, and lower classes, with each of these three categories in turn subdivided into an upper and lower segment: There's no suggestion that this hierarchical structure does the job perfectly; no categorizations can do full justice to the complexities that actually abound in life. But among the virtues of the recommended framework are its usefulness in portraying social differentiation over time, its correspondence both to informed usage and to the actual state of affairs at any moment, and its flexibility. The exact ingredients of upper‑class membership were quite dissimilar in Thomas Jefferson's America from what they were in J.Pierrepont Morgan's a century later. Yet in the one era as in the other, an exclusive, fabulously wealthy and socially and politically powerful class was a significant element of the American social order. Such a clue to upper crust standing in young James Madison's America as the political office of justice was no longer appropriate a century later, when that and other marks of status lost their earlier prestige. The suggested structure is flexible enough to absorb the changes that inevitably overtake the ranking of particular indicators over the course of time, while efficiently accounting for the social gulf that separates groups of American families from one another at all times.

However defined, class has played a highly significant role in the lives and thinking of the Americans. Substantial research on the American society from the Revolutionary era to the present has established the manifold and powerful effects of class. Class has controlled the quality and the quantity of the food the Americans eat, the clothes they wear, their household furnishings, the extent of their leisure, and the very air they breathe. It determines their social universe and behavior, the quality of their marriages, and their fertility. The quality of education they get vary by social class, resulting in dissimilar characteristics in children from different social contexts and ultimately influences the occupational roles they havein adult society. Class has much to do with the disease people are likely to contract and suffer; medical facilities and the remedies they can afford. Class influences the kind of crime people commit, the quality of legal defense they can obtain, the severity of punishments they can receive for their wrong-doings and illegal activities.

If class is a significant element in the American life, that is because it has always been important. The precise ingredients of class may have varied from one time to another, and the relative proportions enrolled in the differing classes have changed, as have the gaps between the adjacent classes on the social ladder. But as even a swift glance at the American history makes clear, class and status distinctions emerged during the colonial beginnings of the nation, and have subsequently retained their importance, notwithstanding the modifications inevitably produced by time.

Tasks