I have been struggling for some time in an effort to get a grasp of how the notion of class operates in contemporary American society. It is pretty clear to me that it has changed a lot over the past 70 years. There are several specific instances where I find it difficult to understand its present workings. Two examples are the steady trend toward greater economic inequality that has been underway for more than a generation with a seemingly passive public acquiescence and the discussions about police violence with the competing claims of race and class as the prime factor behind it.
Class is a complex concept. Economist tend to define it fairly narrowly in terms of income level. Sociologists take a broader perspective and include things like education, where you live, how you talk and how you dress. Class was a subject of open political debate during the 1930s in the new deal response to the great depression. It is not explicitly on the political table today. Instead of the class wars, American society is now focused on the culture wars that deal with issues of race, gender and matters coming under the LGBT umbrella. The two major parties take positions to differentiate their brands in terms of them. Those issues were very much not on the table in the 1930s. This diary does not have grandiose pretensions of explaining that complex historical process in a single all encompassing theory. What I want to look at is a simpler notion that the visual symbols that define class have changed significantly and in becoming much less clear and distinct have contributed to blunting the political discourse on class. It doesn't explain everything, but I think it is interesting to explore.
This is how middle class people presented themselves in the 1930s. The styles were highly gendered, but they had they had the common thread of people who did not sweat for a living. Females were not women. They were ladies. They didn't go out to work and when they left home they wore hats and gloves. Men went to work in offices and wore hats, suits and ties. They wore ties even when playing golf.
In contrast this is what working class people looked like.
The differences had a lot to do with the nature of the work that people performed. A large portion of the population performed manual labor in fields such as agriculture, domestic service, manufacturing, etc. There were of course people whose work didn't pay much but had a tinge of middle class respectability. They usually held onto that for dear life. There were other significant class differences in terms of speech patterns, living standards, etc. It is the visual images that are the easiest to compare.
As the impact of the great depression intensified and there was increasing political pressure to respond to the plight of Americans who were quite literally starving, visual symbols of poverty played an important role. John Steinbeck's book The Grapes of Wrath and the movie version of it played an historic role. This is Henry Fonda in the role of Tom Joad that made him famous.
Perhaps the single most iconic image we have from that difficult struggle is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother.
In the process of the new deal and World War II America became a society with a somewhat more equitable distribution of resources than it had been in 1930. That arrangement began slowly slipping in the 1970s.
The America of the 21st C is different in some significant ways. We still have people living in visibly desperate circumstances. However, now we call them homeless instead of poor. That seems to be some sort of redefinition of the problem.
This is a class of outcasts and most Americans are only too happy to look the other way and convince themselves that the plight of these people has nothing to do with them because they have a HOME. If Steinbeck and Lange were still with us they would likely have the power and will to make Americans look as they did before. Not only are those two great artists gone but there is no one to take their place and do their job.
For those who do not have to live out of a shopping cart, the nature of much of the work that people do has changed in 70 years. A much smaller portion of the workforce is engaged in brute manual labor. There is no real argument that talking to angry customers in a call center or flipping burgers beats shoveling coal into a blast furnace. Superficially the work situations of many people look very similar. What are these people actually doing?
In my days of doing various forms of computer support I wandered through an endless sea of offices that look just like this. The reality is that some of those people sitting in front of the computer are doing low level jobs like customer support that barely pay a living wage. The stress and tedium that goes with such jobs really doesn't show up here.
Here we have some people doing programming and software development, techies as they are known. They compose a fairly elite group in the workforce. Their skills are usually in demand and they get paid quite well. Yet, their work environment isn't really any different from the call center and their personal appearance is likely to be more eccentric and less respectably middle class.
There are some people in publicly visible professions who still dress in fairly formal business attire and a few even still have private offices and personal secretaries, but there aren't many of them. Some people still do manual labor. However, when all of these people head for the mall or the ball game on the weekend they pretty much look alike in their casual clothing. It would be difficult to assign them to any sort of class slot just by looking at them in passing.
This process of cultural homogenization has gone beyond just visual appearance. Television has played a major role in eliminating regional accents in speech and in standardizing everyday language. It is difficult to draw firm conclusions about a person's background and education in the process of a brief and casual conversation.
None of this is to say that Americans have ceased to be status conscious. People can make elaborate gradations about the status value of all sorts of thing such as neighborhood, cars and designer outfits. But in a general sense most Americans give the appearance of being part of a large herd. I think that is more the case now than it was in the past.
In the immediate post war years and the level of broad prosperity many people were experiencing economic progress and rising standards of living. There were of course groups who were left out of that picture. Racial minorities were a glaring example. However, that level of prosperity and economic improvement has slowly become a reality for fewer and fewer Americans. Yet a majority of them cling to the notion of membership in a privileged middle class whose interests the society is geared to serve. Class has become something that we just don't talk about. I think that what we see and hear in everyday life has something to do with that. It certainly serves of the financial elite who are grasping an ever larger piece of the pie.