Social class is an important theme for historians of the United States for decades. The subject touches on many other elements of American history such as that of changing U.S. education, with greater education attainment leading to expanding household incomes for many social groups. The overall level of prosperity grew greatly in the U.S. through the 20th century as well as the 21st century, anchored in changes such as growing American advances in science and technology with American inventions such as the phonograph, the portable electric vacuum cleaner, and so on. Yet much of the debate has focused lately on whether social mobility has fallen in recent decades as income inequality has risen, what scholars such as Katherine S. Newman have called the "American nightmare." [1]
For most of American history, social class barriers were fundamentally rigid, with various private and public institutions enforcing rules based on racial segregation and other forms of classifying people based on prejudices such as antisemitism and Hispanophobia. All this changed greatly with the rise of broad-based prosperity in the aftermath of World War II and efforts to expand Constitutional civil rights under the law to groups such as African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. Issues regarding social class have remained hot-button topics in U.S. politics, with the American Great Recession causing massive socio-economic harm across the country from southerners to northerners to working-class whites to middle-class blacks
Historians in recent decades have explored in microscopic detail the process of settling the new country and creating the social structure.
The main themes have been the class system of the plantation South. These include the plantation masters and their families, as typified by the Byrd family. The plantation elite in gen regions of the Chesapeake, with some attention to South Carolina as well. The region had very few urban places apart from Charleston, where a merchant elite maintained close connections with nearby plantation society. It was a goal of prosperous merchants, lawyers and doctors in Charleston to buy lands and retire as country gentlemen. Charleston supported diverse ethnic groups, including Germans and French, as well as a free black population. Beyond the plantations yeoman farmers operated small holdings, sometimes with a slave or two. Missionaries commented on their lack of religiosity. The plantation areas of Virginia were integrated into the vestry system of the established Anglican church. By the 1760s a strong tendency to emulate British society was apparent in the plantation regions. However the growing strength of republicanism created a political ethos that resisted imperial taxation without local consent. Led by Virginia, the Southern Colonies resisted the British policy of taxation without representation, and supported the American Revolution, sending wealthy planters such as George Washington to lead the armies and Thomas Jefferson to declare the principles of independence, as well as thousands of ordinary folk to man the armies. [2]
New England was settled by community groups, that transplanted their social structure from England. In New England there was a flattening--owning land was a reality for most families, and the system of powerful landlords that pervaded English rural life was not carried over. There was no aristocracy. The strong religious base of the Puritans made the social order revolve around the local Congregational church. Education was a high priority; Harvard College was founded in 1636 and provided most of the ministers and lawyers. By 1700 a rich merchant class grew up in Boston, Salem and other seaports, linking the local economy to the entire British Empire. By 1750 land shortages were causing problems, as Yankee began expanding north into Maine and New Hampshire, and west into New York. [3]
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner had a frontier based theory. The frontier itself was egalitarian as land ownership was available to all free men. Second deference faded away as frontiersmen treated each other as equals. Third the frontiersmen forced new levels of political equality through Jefferson Democracy and Jacksonian Democracy. Finally the frontier provided a safety valve whereby discontented easterners could find their own lands. Historians now agree that few Eastern city people went to the frontier, but many farmers did so; before 1850 the America had few cities, which were mostly small, and the vast majority of people were rural. According to the Turner model, the social structure of the East was similar to the familiar European class-based structure, while the West increasingly became more socially, politically, and economically equal. [4]
Frank Lawrence Owsley in Plain Folk of the Old South (1949) redefined the debate by starting with the writings of Daniel R. Hundley who in 1860 had defined the Southern middle class as "farmers, planters, traders, storekeepers, artisans, mechanics, a few manufacturers, a goodly number of country school teachers, and a host of half-fledged country lawyers, doctors, parsons, and the like." To find these people Owsley turned to the name-by-name files on the manuscript federal census. Owsley argued that Southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role in it. The religion, language, and culture of these common people created a democratic "plain folk" society. [5]
In his study of Edgefield County, South Carolina, Orville Vernon Burton classified black society into the poor, the yeoman middle class, and the elite. [6] A clear line demarcated the elite, but according to Burton, the line between poor and yeoman was never very distinct. Stephanie McCurry argues, yeomen were clearly distinguished from poor whites by their ownership of land (real property). Yeomen were "self-working farmers," distinct from the elite because they worked their land themselves alongside any slaves they owned. Ownership of large numbers of slaves made the work of planters completely managerial. [7]
The study of slavery as a social and economic system dates from Ulrich B. Phillips in the early 20th century. He argued that plantation slavery was a school for civilizing the blacks, albeit one that produced no graduates. His favoritism toward the slave owners was finally challenged by neoabolitionist historians in the 1950s, most notably Kenneth Stampp. Since the 1960s a large literature has emerged on the social structure of the slave system, especially on such topics as family life, gender roles, resistance to slavery, and demographic trends. The study of free blacks has been slower to emerge because of the shortage of records, but historians have been filling in the picture North and South with studies of free black urban communities, and their religious and political leaders.
The post-slavery era has been dominated by political studies, especially of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. The black churches were not only a political force, but became central to the black community in both urban and rural areas. The emergence of a black musical culture has been linked both to slavery (as in the Blues), and to church music. [8] [9]
Asian Americans had small communities in New York City before 1860. Their greatest growth came on the Pacific Coast, during the Gold Rush and railroad booms of the 1860s. The Chinese who remained in America were violently driven out of the mining and railroad camps, and largely forced into Chinatowns in the larger cities, especially San Francisco. The Chinese exclusion laws of the 1880s created special legal problems, which numerous have explored. The Chinatowns were over 90% male, augmented by a trickle of immigration, and slowly shrank in size until 1940. Local and national attitudes became much more favorable to the Chinese after 1940, largely because of American support for China in World War II.
Japanese immigration was a major factor in the history of Hawaii, and after its annexation in 1898 large numbers moved to the West Coast. Anti-Japanese hostility was strong down to 1941, when it intensified and most Japanese on the West Coast were sent to relocation camps, 1942–44. After 1945 the trickle of immigration from the Philippines, India and Korea grew steadily, creating large communities on the West Coast. Asian immigration grew rapidly after 1965, with a large community that has very high educational achievement levels and high incomes. [10]
In 1848 after the Mexican–American War, the annexation of Texas and the Southwest introduced a Hispanic population that had full citizenship status. About 10,000 Californios lived in the southern part of California, and were numerically overwhelmed by migrants form the East by 1900 that their identity was almost lost. In New Mexico, by contrast, the Mexican population maintained its highly traditionalistic and religious culture, and retained some political power, into the 21st century. The Tejano population of Texas supported the revolution against Mexico in 1836, and gained full citizenship. In practice, however, most were ranch hands with limited political rights under the control of local bosses.
The industrialization of the Northeast dramatically changed the social structure. New wealth abounded, with the growth of factories, railroads, and banks from the 1830 to the 1920s. Hundreds of small cities sprang up, together with 100 large cities (of 100,000 or more population by 1920). Most had a base in manufacturing. The urban areas came to have a complex class structure, compounded of wealth (the more the better), occupation (with the learned professions at the top), and family status (the older the better). Ethnic-religious groups had their separate social systems (such as German Lutherans and Irish Catholics). The New England Yankee was dominant in business, finance, education, and high society in most Northern cities, but gradually lost control of politics to a working class coalition led dominated by bosses and immigrants, including Irish Catholics. Hundreds of new colleges and academies were founded to support the system, usually with specific religious or ethnic identities. Heterogeneous state universities became important after 1920.
The most elaborate and in-depth studies of social class have focused on the working class, especially regarding occupation, immigration, ethnicity, family structure, education, occupational mobility, religious behavior, and neighborhood structure. [11] Before 1970, historians emphasized the success and the painful processes of assimilation into American culture, as studied by Oscar Handlin. In recent decades the internal value systems have been explored, as well as the process of occupational mobility. Most of the studies have been localized (because of the need for the exhaustive use of censuses and local data) so that generalizations have been difficult to make. In recent years European scholars have become interested in the international flows so that there are now studies following people from Europe to America over their lifetimes.
Labor historians have moved from a focus on national labor unions to microscopic studies of the workers in particular industries in particular cities. The consensus has been that the workers had their own political and cultural value system. The political values were based on a producer's ethic, that is the working class was the truly productive sector of society, and expressed a version of republicanism that was similar to the middle class version. [12] [13] This enabled the businessman's party, the Republican party, to enjoy a strong base among Protestant blue collar workers, and prevented the emergence of a strong Socialist movement.
The Progressive Era, with its emphasis on factualism and scientific inquiry produced hundreds of community studies, mostly using descriptive statistics to cover issues of poverty, crime, migration, religiosity, education, and public health. The emergence of systematic social science, especially sociology, shifted the center of class studies into sociology departments. The most representative example was the Middletown books by Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd, which gave a microscopic look at class structures in a typical small city (Muncie, Indiana). After 1960 localized studies gave way to national surveys, with special emphasis on the process of social mobility and stratification.
A classic theme was trying to see if the middle class was shrinking, or if the opportunities for upward mobility had worsened over time. After 1960 a growing concern with education led to many studies dealing with racial integration, and performance in schools by racial and gender groupings.
The disposable income of the American upper class was sharply reduced by high income tax rates during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. During this period corporate executives had relatively modest incomes, lived modestly, and had few servants. [14]
White trash is a derogatory racial and class-related slur used in American English to refer to poor white people, especially in the rural areas of the southern United States. The label signifies a social class inside the white population and especially a degraded standard of living. It is used as a way to separate the "noble and hardworking" "good poor" from the lazy, "undisciplined, ungrateful and disgusting" "bad poor". The use of the term provides middle- and upper-class whites a means of distancing themselves from the poverty and powerlessness of poor whites, who cannot enjoy those privileges, as well as a way to disown their perceived behavior.
Mountain whites were white Americans living in Appalachia and the inland region of the Antebellum South. They were generally small farmers, who inhabited the valleys of the Appalachian range from western Virginia spanning down to northern Georgia and northern Alabama.
Geographically, the U.S. states known as the Old South are those in the Southern United States that were among the original Thirteen Colonies. The region term is differentiated from the Deep South and Upper South.
Little Dixie is a historic 13- to 17-county region along the Missouri River in central Missouri, United States. Its early Anglo-American settlers were largely migrants from the hemp and tobacco districts of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. They brought enslaved African Americans with them or purchased them as workers in the region. Because Southerners settled there first, the pre-Civil War culture of the region was similar to that of the Upper South. The area was also known as Boonslick country.
The Antebellum South era was a period in the history of the Southern United States that extended from the conclusion of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. This era was marked by the prevalent practice of slavery and the associated societal norms it cultivated. Over the course of this period, Southern leaders underwent a transformation in their perspective on slavery. Initially regarded as an awkward and temporary institution, it gradually evolved into a defended concept, with proponents arguing for its positive merits, while simultaneously vehemently opposing the burgeoning abolitionist movement.
The history of the state of Mississippi extends back to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; with Europeans recording the accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 is a history of the Reconstruction era by W. E. B. Du Bois, first published in 1935. The book challenged the standard academic view of Reconstruction at the time, the Dunning School, which contended that the period was a failure and downplayed the contributions of African Americans. Du Bois instead emphasized the agency of Black people and freed slaves during the Civil War and Reconstruction and framed the period as one that held promise for a worker-ruled democracy to replace a slavery-based plantation economy.
A plantation house is the main house of a plantation, often a substantial farmhouse, which often serves as a symbol for the plantation as a whole. Plantation houses in the Southern United States and in other areas are known as quite grand and expensive architectural works today, though most were more utilitarian, working farmhouses.
Frank Lawrence Owsley was an American historian who taught at Vanderbilt University for most of his career, where he specialized in Southern history and was a member of the Southern Agrarians. He is notorious for his essay "The Irrepressible Conflict" (1930) in which he lamented the economic loss of slavery for the defeated Confederacy and of the "half savage blacks" that had been freed. He is also known for his study of Confederate diplomacy based on the idea of "King Cotton" and especially his quantitative social history of the middling "plain people" of the Old South.
Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800, is a book written by historian Allan Kulikoff. Published in 1986, it is the first major study that synthesized the historiography of the colonial Chesapeake region of the United States. Tobacco and Slaves is a neo-Marxist study that explains the creation of a racial caste system in the tobacco-growing regions of Maryland and Virginia and the origins of southern slave society. Kulikoff uses statistics compiled from colonial court and church records, tobacco sales, and land surveys to conclude that economic, political, and social developments in the 18th-century Chesapeake established the foundations of economics, politics, and society in the 19th-century South.
Plain Folk of the Old South is a 1949 book by Vanderbilt University historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, one of the Southern Agrarians. In it he used statistical data to analyze the makeup of Southern society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought.
Bermuda Hundred was the first administrative division in the English colony of Virginia. It was founded by Sir Thomas Dale in 1613, six years after Jamestown. At the southwestern edge of the confluence of the Appomattox and James Rivers opposite City Point, annexed to Hopewell, Virginia in 1923, Bermuda Hundred was a port town for many years. The terminology "Bermuda Hundred" also included a large area adjacent to the town. In the colonial era, "hundreds" were large developments of many acres, arising from the English term to define an area which would support 100 homesteads. The port at the town of Bermuda Hundred was intended to serve other "hundreds" in addition to Bermuda Hundred.
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South is a book written by American historian John W. Blassingame. Published in 1972, it is one of the first historical studies of slavery in the United States to be presented from the perspective of the enslaved. The Slave Community contradicted those historians who had interpreted history to suggest that African-American slaves were docile and submissive "Sambos" who enjoyed the benefits of a paternalistic master–slave relationship on southern plantations. Using psychology, Blassingame analyzes fugitive slave narratives published in the 19th century to conclude that an independent culture developed among the enslaved and that there were a variety of personality types exhibited by slaves.
Social class in Haiti uses a class structure that groups people according to wealth, income, education, type of occupation, and membership in a specific subculture or social network. Since the colonial period as part of the colony of Saint-Domingue (1625–1804), race has played an important factor in determining social class.
Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.
The treatment of slaves in the United States sometimes included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
Poor White is a sociocultural classification used to describe economically disadvantaged Whites in the English-speaking world, especially White Americans with low incomes.
There have always been marked distinctions of social class in Colombia, although twentieth-century economic development has increased social mobility to some extent. Distinctions are based on wealth, social status, and race. Informal networks (roscas) centered on a person in a position of power are one factor in upper-class dominance. Official demographic categories based mainly on housing characteristics shed some light on the socioeconomic makeup of the population.
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia is a 1975 history text by American historian Edmund Morgan. The work was first published in September 1975 through W W Norton & Co Inc and is considered to be one of Morgan's seminal works.
The Black Belt in the American South refers to the social history, especially concerning slavery and black workers, of the geological region known as the Black Belt. The geology emphasizes the highly fertile black soil. Historically, the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites, and worked by very poor, primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. Generally the term is applied to a larger region than that defined by its geology.
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