American Misfits and the Making of Middle-Class Respectability

Robert Wuthnow

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780691210711, 9780691176864
• eBook ISBN: 9781400888092
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: North American History

How American respectability has been built by maligning those who don't make the grade

How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply?

The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—"misfits"—who deviated from accepted norms.

Robert Wuthnow argues that respectability is constructed by "othering" people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. He demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering.

Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the "othering" that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.

CHAPTER ONE

A Relational Approach

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RESPECT AND RESPECTABILITY

HANS JAKOB OLSON with his wife Bertha and three children emigrated from Norway in 1871, settling on a scrubby forty-acre farm in western Wisconsin where three more children were born over the next few years. On November 24, 1889, following the community’s Sunday evening church services, Olson was seized from his bed and hanged from a tree outside the family’s home by a vigilante mob of more than two dozen local residents. A journalist who covered the ensuing investigation described Olson as a ne’er-do-well who roamed the neighborhood at night scaring people by peeking in windows and then running off. The investigation suggested that Olson may have spent time in prison, been abusive toward his family, and on one occasion threatened to burn down the house. The vigilantes’ ringleader was Charles Johnson, a neighbor who served as president of the Farmers’ Trading Association and had business ties with the old-stock Yankee establishment. An account of the trial reported that Johnson “was so well respected that he had the trust of the community, and the fathers and mothers of the young boys who were members of the mob believed that he wished only to lead the children into good deeds.”¹

Questions about respect and respectability appear in a wide variety of contexts. Twenty-first-century advocates of uplift for poor families and of greater inclusion for gays and lesbians, for example, have argued that gaining respectability by putting aside distinctive personal habits, styles of dress, and demeanor may be the key to accomplishing these tangible goals. Critics of such proposals, in contrast, argue that the politics of respectability expects disadvantaged groups to police their own behavior instead of challenging prevailing social norms.² In electoral politics similar discussions have hinged on whether particular candidates and officeholders have blatantly transgressed accepted standards of respectability and whether others in high office have stayed too narrowly within these confines.³

Historical research illustrates the varied contexts in which questions about respect and respectability arise as well. A recent study of the American abolitionist movement demonstrates, for example, the extent to which the movement sought to enhance its reputation for respectability through “sane and decent” meetings and “good manners” in the face of critics who branded abolitionism as “crazy,” “wild,” and “promiscuous.”⁴ The mid-twentieth-century struggle for respectability by southern country musicians posed a similar challenge because of racial divisions and was waged through professionalization, musical innovation, and marketing that ran against the region’s poor-white rural reputation.⁵ Woodruff D. Smith’s wide-ranging history of consumer goods during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries similarly emphasizes respectability, viewing it as the key to their meaning and how they signaled the modernization of social relationships. Nineteenth-century obituaries and news stories such as the ones about Charles Johnson frequently described the perpetrators or victims of crimes as respected members of their communities.⁶

Respect and respectability are topics of continuing interest because privileges and resources flow so often to those deemed respectable, while disrespect goes hand in hand with disadvantage and discrimination. Respect is valued in its own right but is also deployable in negotiating for political and economic power. Examples abound of disgraced public figures seeking to regain respect and of marginalized groups—speculators, pawnbrokers, sex workers, circus barkers, survivalists, migrant laborers, among others—pursuing respectability and being called on by higher-status groups to do something different in hopes of acquiring it.⁷ Whether for these or for other reasons, respect and respectability are traits that families and schools endeavor to cultivate in children and that organizations consider essential to good employee and customer relations.⁸ Attaining and maintaining respectability is said to be one of the reasons people attend religious services and is perhaps a consideration in religious organizations’ efforts to promote decency and decorum.⁹ Other discussions emphasize society’s mechanisms for facilitating conformity by stigmatizing groups that insiders regard as lacking respectability. Another context in which the topic receives attention is the management of self-respect.

Respect overlaps with but is distinguishable from concepts such as trust and prestige. Trust is an expectation based on past performance in role-specific activities, whereas respect refers to an assessment of the more diffuse qualities of persons.¹⁰ A person who is respected is likely to also be trusted, but with notable exceptions, as in the case of scoundrels in public office who are not respected but are trusted to make bad laws, or members of a stigmatized ethnic group who are trusted to serve faithfully in menial jobs. Respect and prestige often go hand in hand as well but differ in that prestige indicates occupancy of a highly valued position in a social hierarchy, whereas respect may include relationships among persons of equal status.¹¹

Efforts to study the meanings and manifestations of respectability have taken a wide variety of approaches, including practical interests in self-improvement and those stemming from therapeutic, religious, and medical authorities claiming to know how to determine who was respectable and who was not. A method of assessing women’s respectability that gained interest in conjunction with phrenology in the 1890s, for example, consisted of reading character from inspection of the vagina. As a “genitologist” reported in the Journal of Orificial Surgery about one of his recent patients, she was “a woman of great power” who could “accomplish anything she undertakes … with great determination and energy … has the power of an organizer and campaigner [and] possesses wonderful powers of observation.” He was certain that she exhibited “extreme force of character.” This method’s popularity was brief.¹²

The social science literature has often considered respect and respectability as culturally conditioned attributes of persons, such that a person who behaves in certain ways is respectable while another person who behaves differently is not respectable. In this view respectability is a trait that individuals learn or aspire to learn, usually as children and in early adulthood, and, once learned, becomes a stable personal attribute that can be carried from place to place and can serve the individual in attaining coveted goals in life, such as a good job and desirable friends. Melvin L. Kohn’s research on child-rearing values in the 1950s, for example, argued that working-class parents were especially concerned about honesty and neatness because these were “qualities of respectable, worthwhile people” and would thus be important to their children’s success in life.¹³

As an enduring attribute that individuals either manifest or aspire to, respectability could then be understood as a characteristic of large segments of the population. Middle-class respectability in this view referred to relatively fixed attributes and values shared by the large number of individuals who composed the middle class. It represented in various formulations a stable, well-defined normative structure, collection of rules, or value system that reinforced and rewarded certain kinds of behavior, such as honesty and neatness, and served as a standard against which “deviance” could be measured. Juvenile delinquents, for example, were said to deviate from the norms of middle-class respectability for various reasons that included improper socialization, personality defects, and economic disadvantages.¹⁴

Much research, of course, has challenged the view that respectability was simply a value system to which some adhered and from which others deviated. Research has paid closer attention to the contested nature of respectability, including the strategies that groups seeking respectability use to attain it and the strategies through which dominant groups ground claims of superior respectability. Respectability emerges in these studies as not only contested but also changeable and negotiable. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who coined the phrase “politics of respectability” in her study of late nineteenth-century African American Baptist church women, for example, observes that the “talented tenth” who played important leadership roles promoted racial pride by encouraging fewer displays of emotion in worship, emphasizing cleanliness and disciplined home management, and discouraging women from wearing gaudy colors as well as advocating for economic and educational opportunities.¹⁵ The conclusion is not that something that might be called middle-class respectability is nonexistent but that its existence is situational, diversely understood and attained, and contingent on multifaceted activities and cultural constructions. How honesty and neatness are constructed and communicated is more the issue than simply knowing that they are valued. Respectability is understood not only as a value but also as an encounter. Dress and demeanor matter in gauging how deviance is interpreted. Architecture and extravagance suggest respectability in some instances as much as professionalism and skill.¹⁶

Following in this line of research, the approach taken here emphasizes that respect and respectability are relational. They are best understood in terms of a contrast between what counts as respectable and what does not, either as the absence of respectability or as its antithesis. A respected person or group contrasts with one that is variously shifty, unrefined, wicked, or simply disgusting. The binaries of metaphor—high vs. low, light vs. dark, close vs. distant, and so on—come into play in making these contrasts. To say that someone is respectable necessitates asking, respected by whom and in comparison with what? There is in addition a performative aspect to the literal and figurative relationships involved. As Amy Laura Hall observes, “Respectability is not just a status; it is a performance, for an audience [and] these performances are ritualized in order for them to be correctly understood.”¹⁷

Relational approaches that have gained popularity in studies of topics as diverse as economic sociology, microsociology, and the sociology of social networks derive from several theoretical traditions, perhaps the most notable of which is Émile Durkheim’s emphasis on the categorical principles through which social life is organized and particularly the ritualization of the distinction between that which is sacred and that which is profane. In subsequent contributions by Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Susanne K. Langer, Norman O. Brown, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others, relationality emphasized that categories exist only to the extent that they interact with one another. Words and numbers have meanings, Langer argued, “in terms of relationships, not of substance.” Power lies in the interstices, Brown observed, and in the transgressions, as Douglas suggested.¹⁸

While the human cognition involved in constructing categories is important as a starting point, relational approaches emphasize the social interaction through which categories such as respect and disrespect are created and maintained. Categories in this understanding are more than mental schemas through which individuals organize information. They are part of a dynamic process in which people in real life relate to one another in ways that sometimes affirm social boundaries and at other times violate those boundaries. The boundary work includes social practices in which names and labels are communicated, idioms are deployed, and understandings about what is appropriate to do and say are negotiated. Investigating these practices necessitates paying close attention to the transactions involved and doing so without emphasizing social boundaries as reified pre-existing categories but by examining why the parties are interacting in the first place, what is at stake, and the scripts that explain how what they are doing is legitimate. Relational approaches, Mustafa Emirbayer argues, “reject the notion that one can posit discrete, pregiven units such as the individual or society as ultimate starting points … [persons] are inseparable from the transactional contexts within which they are embedded.” And if that is true of persons, it also pertains to personal attributes.¹⁹

Approaching respectability from a relational perspective contrasts especially with viewing it as a variable. In that view, some people are simply respectable to a greater degree than others. The topic of interest is inequality, period. What are the social conditions that facilitate some people acquiring respectability while inhibiting others? The image is of a gradient along which autonomous individuals and groups can be placed, each striving to move up, attaining respectability that associates them with something already identifiable as the middle class. Relationships among the parties involved may be present but are incidental. A relational approach, in contrast, makes them central. Respectability is less of an attribute that someone simply has and more of an outcome implicitly negotiated in relationships that simultaneously constitute the meanings of middle-class refinement and middle-class moral expectations. Respectability is a process of compare and contrast. What counts as respectable behavior is defined by negative example. Those who are maligned as the “other”—as outsiders, misfits, ne’er-do-wells, defectives, degenerates—are as essential to the social construction of respectability as are its exemplars.

The relationality of respect and respectability can be examined at four levels that bring to focus distinct aspects of social life: practices, discourse, organizational arrangements, and machineries of enforcement. The boundary work involved in drawing distinctions between the “us” that manifests respectability in various ways and the “them” that perhaps even more clearly demonstrates what respectability is by its absence, I argue, is best understood through the multiple lenses that these aspects of social life illuminate.

Practices

Practices are routines of social interaction that include among other things physical and discursive acts that serve as markers of respectability. The literature on social practices emphasizes that they involve activities that occur repeatedly rather than on a one-off basis and for this reason can be examined in terms of recurring patterns. As the parties engage in a practice over time they adapt to changing circumstances and innovate and yet follow rules that may or may not be formalized, in the process developing skills that facilitate their interaction. Examples of practices include such activities as playing chess and practicing the piano, which illustrate activities that take place over time, involve rules, and require skill. Some discussions also regard such practices as the methods through which personal virtues, such as patience and courage, are learned.²⁰ A relational approach understands practices less in terms of patterns and skills and more as the unfolding interplay of which social interaction is composed: chess is less about the rules of the game and more about the moves and countermoves of the two contestants; piano playing is not only the solitary student repeating the scales but also the relationship between student and teacher and between performer and audience.

Practices establish the contexts in which respect and respectability are attended to and displayed, in the first instance, by circumscribing what Alfred Schutz termed “domains of relevance.”²¹ Master chess players earn the respect of other chess players by deploying innovative strategies. An amateur pianist may be judged to have performed respectably by doing about as well as others at the same level. But practices are interlaced, which suggests that respectability requires consistency across domains of relevance and boundary work to separate public and private domains. An otherwise respectable British college professor, for example, whose sideline was privately performing in pornographic films was a case in point. Practices also establish the social horizon in which activities relevant to respectability are defined. What counts as respectable and what contrasts with it differ from place to place and from time to time. Gaming at private clubs and on country estates was a mark of respectability for English aristocrats in the seventeenth century, for example, but by the end of the eighteenth century was widely criticized as a dissolute use of time.²²

The social interaction of which practices are composed occurs both in concrete, face-to-face situations, such as chess matches and piano recitals, and in larger “imagined communities,” such as between groups with different ethnic identities. Generali...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Relational Approach: The Social Construction of Respect and Respectability
• Chapter 2: Worked as a Huckster: Moral Connotations of Placeless Labor
• Chapter 3: An Incurable Lunatic: Pension Politics in the Struggle for Respectability
• Chapter 4: Not a Fanatic: Zeal in the Cause of Zion
• Chapter 5: Dying Young: Immigrant Congregations as Moral Communities
• Chapter 6: Excessive Profits: Wealth, Morality, and the Common People
• Chapter 7: Naughty Children: Moral Instruction by Negative Example
• Chapter 8: Othering: Cultural Diversity and Symbolic Boundaries
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• A Note on the Type