September 3, 2008

• Social Class in America

  Social Class
  This concept is simply a sort of shorthand description of where each of us fits in or culture’s “pecking order”. As is the case with many species, it is partially self-determined, but mostly the result of the social judgments and attitudes of our friends and neighbors.

  Traditionally, this is the result of centuries of sorting out. In Europe the class systems have been pretty clearly defined: An Upper, aristocratic class of land and title holders who pretty much dominated the lower classes.
  A sort of Middle class of artisans and merchants who in Renaissance times became much more important with the rise of mercantile trade and the redefinition of wealth.
  A much larger Lower Class of serfs and tenant farmers dependent upon and dominated by the landowning Upper class Aristocrats and landowning Gentry

  In America, that system never really took hold for a number of reasons. One of the English Colonies (South Carolina) was actually founded upon the rigid class structure with certain colonists designated as titled Aristocrats who were allowed to import their own serfs who were to be tied to the land they were allotted. It was simply too easy to walk away to the unclaimed land to the North and West and the Aristocrats were neither rich enough nor powerful enough to enforce the system.
  In the New England colonies, settlement was mostly based upon religious dissent and the colonists were mostly from the rising Middle Classes - what you believed and how you stood in your Church was more important than your ancestry.
  In all the colonies and later in the new United States, it was fairly easy to develop your land and get ownership directly from the colonial proprietors (Or later the government) who were almost all absentee landlords only interested in their income (Which was seldom what they expected). More and more of the colonies became self-governing and finally broke away into a new independent country.
  Class systems in those colonies were almost all based on the attitudes of the local inhabitants, with the Upper, middle, and lower Classes being much more fluid than in the homeland. During his trip to America in the 1830's, Alexis deTocqueville had difficulty describing American class structure, which to him seemed almost nonexistent

  In twenty-first century America, The amazing patterns of individual movement and nationwide communications, awareness, and economics have made the old system pretty much obsolete, at least on the national level.
  Nowadays, a person’s class still depends on the attitudes of the other members of the culture, but those attitudes are much more likely to be based on the individual’s accomplishments or particular current situation, not on their ancestry.
  Today in America, the Classes are not as clearly defined. we seem to have a sort of Five-Class system separated into two general divisions:
  The Upper Class:
  The Real Uppers: Generally economic based, made up of those with inherited wealth who have also managed to accomplish notable deeds.
  The Semi-Uppers: Made up of professionals and celebrities - This is a fairly large group sometimes based on education and self-determination, ranging from large business owners, Religious leaders, MDs, and college profs to public school teachers. Traditionally, a major key to entrance into the Semi-upper class has been a respectable college diploma. Recently, it is probably an advanced degree of some kind.
  The Supporting Classes:
  Middle: Small business owners, local managers, self-employed skilled artisans, etc.
  Working: Mostly anyone who works full time for an hourly wage rather than a defined salary
  Real Lower: Casual laborers, welfare recipients, the homeless.

  Fifty years ago the classes were further divided along racial lines with, in many communities, a kind of parallel class structure among the African-American and white communities, but this parallel structure seems to be rapidly fading as race becomes less and less a factor in the American Class system.

  This analysis of class is loosely based on the system described by Vance Packard about fifty years ago. In social class determinents, the factors are generally slow to change, but change they do.

  Should Americans, prime believers in equality, have a class system, and if we do,what should be its basis; Moral, Ethical, Religious, Economic, all of the above?

  • 1:50 pm
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