When Did We All Become Middle Class?

Martin Nunlee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138655249
• eBook ISBN: 9781317223085
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

In When Did We All Become Middle Class?, Martin Nunlee discusses how a lack of class identity gives people a false sense of their relationship to power, which has made the US population accept the myth that they live in a meritocracy. This book examines social class within the framework of psychological tendencies, everyday interactions, institutions and pervasive cultural ideas to show how Americans have shifted from general concerns of social and economic equality to fragmented interests groups.

Written in a conversational style, this book is a useful tool for undergraduate courses covering social class, such as inequality, stratification, poverty, and social problems.

Chapter 1
Class Confusion

The title asks, ‘When did we all become middle class?’ The short answer is: February of 1940, when Fortune magazine reported that nearly 80% of Americans claimed to be middle class.¹ What makes this result surprising is that this was pre-World War II and America had not fully recovered from the Great Depression. Just two years before the survey, President Roosevelt is on record as saying that one-third of the US population was “ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed.”²

Social scientists have known for some time that there is a relatively poor relationship between class identification and objective class location. A large part of this poor relationship occurs as the result of survey questions. Fortune based its claim that nearly 80% of Americans were middle class on data obtained in a Roper poll that asked the following question, “[w]hat word do you use to name the class in America you belong to?” To answer this question respondents were given the following anchors: upper, middle, and lower. Almost 80% of respondents said they were middle class. There is a problem with this question—people knew that they were not upper class, but who wants to say they are lower class? Near the end of the 1940s less than half of Americans claimed to be middle class. When sociologist Richard Center asked “If you were asked to use one of these four names for your social class, which would you say you belonged in: the middle class, lower class, working class or upper class?,”³ 51% of the respondents said they were working class, while 43% claimed to be middle class.

We can see the effects of limiting respondent choices still happening today. In 2008, the Pew survey asked Americans to indicate their class by choosing from ‘upper class,’ ‘upper middle class,’ ‘middle class,’ ‘lower middle class’ and ‘lower class.’ Nearly 92% of people identified themselves as being in one of the middle classes.⁴ In the General Social Survey poll, people were given the choice of ‘upper class,’ ‘middle class,’ ‘working class,’ and ‘lower class.’ In this survey, 46.8% identified themselves as being working class, and 42.4% identified themselves as being middle class.⁵ What a difference a few words make.

In truth, the criteria for social class and especially middle class have been very elusive. An article in the New York Times stated that the term middle class is “as much aspirational as descriptive.”⁶ Focusing on the middle class, R. H. Gretton said it best:⁷

[T]he very name ‘Middle Class’ suggests a stratum of society which, though obviously in existence, and calling for a descriptive label, was so lacking in marked characteristics or qualities that it could only be described as lying between two other classes.

The definition of middle class given above is consistent with most of the definitions of middle class listed in dictionaries, as being the group between the upper classes and the working classes. Now according to Michael Adams, a professor at Indiana University and historian of the English language, “when Americans use middle class today, they have something wider in mind, including people we would consider workers.”⁸ With such a vague meaning, the term middle class has become meaningless. Before sharing the definition used throughout this book, it is first necessary to define social class.

What is Social Class?

Americans like to pretend that there is no such thing as a social class, or that social class is unimportant. Yet we all know that social classes exist. Anyone who knows anything about the USA quickly observes that there are large variations in wealth, power, authority, and prestige throughout the country. Further observation would reveal that Americans have differences in access to education, healthcare, living conditions, and leisure.

Social class can be expressed in terms of psychological tendencies, everyday interactions, institutions, and pervasive cultural ideas.⁹ More precisely, psychological tendencies would consist of how people perceive social class. The way a person perceives him- or herself can influence their decision making and self-identity, as well as influencing their choices, and attitudes toward religion and politics. Everyday interaction encompasses how people relate to others formally and informally. These interactions influence how people parent, relate to authority figures, and conduct themselves professionally. Institutions refer to how much access a person has to capital, education, political resources. There are several pervasive ideas within our culture. The American Dream, individualism, and independence are pervasive cultural ideas. Pervasive ideas are also beliefs associated with how much success reflects hard work (meritocracy), and the tension between the ideal that everyone is created equal and the reality of inequality. Each one of these aspects of social class impacts the other.

Pervasive ideas have to be transmitted to be effective. Cultural reproduction is concerned with the continuity of cultural values and norms across generations. According to Bourdieu, people seek to preserve their social classes by continuing existing social structures to maintain their advantage.¹⁰ One of the main purposes of educational institutions is to serve as a mechanisms for cultural reproduction. We learn how to behave in school. We learn cultural norms and behaviors in schools. We also learn about our common heritage in a form that reinforces the status quo. Think back to some of the things you learned in history when you were in elementary school. Whether it was Plymouth Rock or James Town, we were taught that the people who founded the nation were brave people deserving our honor. We even know their names, yet several groups came to America before the English. Even ignoring the Indigenous population and focusing just on Europeans, the French settled what is now Port Royal, South Carolina, in 1562, and the Spanish settled Saint Augustine, Florida, in 1564. Although the English did not arrive in America until the 1600s, we were taught to honor the people who later came to be the successful founders of our nation and not the true first settlers. However, educational institutions are not the only source of cultural reproduction. Cultural norms, values, and information are also taught through informal interactions both in and out of the classroom. Closely aligned to cultural reproduction is social reproduction. Christopher Doob defines social reproduction as “the structures and activities that transmit social inequality from one generation to the next.”¹¹

By definition social class is a hierarchy which stratifies members on the basis of power, esteem, and prestige. Power, esteem, and prestige are complex, intertwined, and codependent. Although individuals can acquire power, esteem, and prestige in many ways, people in America acquire power mainly through economic success and accumulation of wealth. This definition and the taxonomy to be developed from this definition focuses on the institutional aspects of social class, since it examines social class from a resource perspective. By nature, resource-based perspectives are concerned with the role that income, wealth, occupation, status, and social capital has on social class, as opposed to how everyday interactions and psychological tendencies relate to social class. This is not to argue that everyday interactions and psychological tendencies are not important. Rather it is to argue that resource-based and individually based approaches to social class are not mutually exclusive. Further, the resource-based approach readily provides a method of grouping people and households at a more aggregate level than the individualized nature of approaches based upon everyday interactions and psychological tendencies.

Even though we can define it, we have a difficult time measuring social class. One way of assessing social class is to rely upon self-reports in surveys, but this can be unreliable, especially if the person answering questions in the survey has no idea of the dimensions used to measure class. Another way of determining social class is to rely upon cues. In our daily interactions, we attempt to obtain information (cues) concerning membership to a particular class. We assess class by taking note of a person’s level of education, neighborhood, manner of dress, manner of speech (conversation topics, grammar, style, etc.), material possession (automobile, jewelry, accessories, etc.). Many of these cues can mislead us. Social scientists even add to the confusion by oversimplifying measures of class membership. To keep things simple, many social scientists just divide the population into fifths (quintiles) by income, with one-fifth lower class, three-fifths middle class, and one-fifth upper class. The simple assignment of people into numerical clusters is equally misleading, especially if these clusters do not relate to levels of power, esteem, and prestige.

Income and occupation are good ways of assessing membership of a particular social class. Income provides a good indication of the ability to acquire wealth and resources. Obviously very high and very low incomes will dictate membership of a particular social class, but, excluding income extremes, income alone is not sufficient for assessing membership of a particular class. Occupation also provides an indication of how people earn their money, which creates a strong incentive for people to develop a shared interest in preserving or advancing their collective welfare.¹² Occupation is also often associated with esteem and prestige, but there are different levels of prestige within an occupation. Neither one of these measures fully captures power, esteem, and prestige. Whereas the combination of income and occupation are good measures of social class, even these two measures are insufficient to fully ascertain membership of a particular social class.

The main shortcoming of income is that it does not fully account for accumulated wealth. Who has more power in a community, the person who owns a factory that employs the largest number of people, or a person who just won the lottery? Suppose the person who owns the factory pays herself or himself $200,000 per year, while the lottery winner received a one-time check of $1,000,000. Most people correctly answer ‘the person who owns the factory.’ It is not old money versus new money—it is the accumulation of wealth. The control of productive assets leads to power and influence. Besides, the person owning the factory is probably worth several million. Unless the lottery winner had wealth before their big win, they may have a net worth just equal to their winnings. With that said, even with its shortcomings income is one of the best methods for assessing membership of a class. It is fairly easy to obtain income levels about a household. It is a little more difficult to obtain wealth information.

Traditionally, wealth has always been a part of defining class. During our early history the middle class—then known as the ‘middling sorts’—were shopkeepers, farmers, tradespeople and professionals. All of these people owned capital necessary to practice their craft and profession. Lawrence Samuel, the author of The American Middle Class, asserts that “annual income has typically been the economic measure by which to define class in America, but I feel that net worth (the financial value of one’s total assets less liabilities) is a truer criterion.”¹³ Wealth also secures a person’s class position, by providing a source of stability even during fluctuating economic times.

Although wealth is a better indicator of social class than income, it is often easier to determine a person’s income from cues than their wealth. Most of us have seen I Love Lucy on television. According to TV Guide 40 million Americans still watch the zany antics of Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy reruns.¹⁴ Instead of focusing on the main characters, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, we will examine the Mertzs—two pivotal characters on the show. Fred and Ethel Mertz were the best friends and neighbors of the Ricardos. They were also Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s landlords. The Mertz’s building was located at 623 East 68th Street, in Manhattan, New York. Although we know that address would place the building in the East River, this will not deter us from analyzing this situation according to the neighborhood. From what we can glean by watching episodes, we know that the Ricardos originally lived above Fred and Ethel. Later the Ricardos moved to apartment 3B, across from the Mertzs. This means that the building had at least four floors and we know that there were at least two units (an A and a B unit) per floor, which means that the building had at least eight units. From this information we can ascertain the wealth and income the Mertzs derive from their apartment building. Instead of using mid-1950s dollars, we should convert this in to today’s dollars. An eight-unit apartment building on the East side of Manhattan would cost at least $2 million in today’s market. Apartments on East 68th Street rent for at least $3,500 per month; subtracting the one apartment’s rent would leave a gross of $252,000 per year; after subtracting repair and maintenance, utilities, professional fees, principle and interest, taxes and insurance, the Mertzs would have an apartment plus $56,000 per year, or a total of $98,000...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Class Confusion
• 2 What Social Class Isn’t
• 3 Defining Classes
• 4 The Basis of Class
• 5 Social Class and Political Power
• 6 Social Class and Race
• 7 Gender and Social Class
• 8 Media, Marketing, and Social Class
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index