Middle Class

This being an election season, there's a lot of news about the "shrinking middle class".  Given the historical focus of this blog, I got to thinking about that and wondered where the "middle class" fit in historic terms in this country, and in the Western World in general.  Who were they, and what percentage of the population were they?  It turns out to be a much more complicated topic than a person might suppose.  That doesn't mean that it isn't shrinking in the US, it is, and that is indeed disturbing.  At the same time, the middle class is increasing globally, which is a good thing.  Not much noticed in the news, for example, is the fact that for the first time in Mexico's history the middle class is the largest class in that country, having replaced the poor in that category. Nonetheless, even defining what the middle class is is surprisingly tricky.  Indeed, defining the poor is tricky too, or the wealthy, with definitions varying depending upon where you are in the world.  That later fact probably explains much of the difficult Western nations have grasping the concerns of poorer ones, fwiw.

 Rich and Poor.  Harper's, 1873.

The terms seems to have been first used in the United Kingdom in 1745, appearing for the first time in print as a mere observation, but which shows that, at that point in English history, it was not possible to speak of the well off and everyone else.  This is probably not surprising as industry hit the United Kingdom very early, and while 1745 would not fit into the period of the British industrial revolution, develops that would lead to it were definitely occurring.  This was giving rise to a skilled class of "mechanics" and a merchant class in towns and cities.  Political developments in the United Kingdom in the 19th Century would also see the restoration of British yeomanry, an independent farming class.  All this gave rise to a British definition of the middle class being:

A class of society or social grouping between an upper and a lower (or working) class, usually regarded as including professional and business people and their families; (in sing. and pl.) the members of such a class

Oxford English Dictionary.

It can't be said, however, that this analysis would make very much sense in American terms.  The United States probably had a middle class, as we'd understand it, from day one.  The US had a very large yeoman class everywhere, in some regions the yeomanry did quite well, which is not to say that there were not many poor, including poor yeomen.  By definition, yeoman were independent free holding farmers.  That was something that it was nearly impossible to achieve in the European nations prior to the revolutions of 1798 and 1845, and which was very difficult to achieve in the UK prior to the political reforms of the 19th Century.  But in North America, acquiring land was easy.  Making the land into something was much more difficult, but the first thing you needed to become a freeholding landowner, land, was readily available.  And, because it was available, the fact that others might have enormous land holdings wouldn't mean that a person would necessarily be held up just because there was a wealthy landowner in the neighborhood.

 Plow boy, literally.  Child plowing.

All that diminishes the very hard work that being a freeholding farmer entailed, or that being a homesteader entailed, but nonetheless it's significant in terms of economic history.  It was simply much easier to become what we'd now regard as middle class in North America, whether that would be by farming, or by way of some other means.  As one grandchild or Russian Jewish immigrants, who became ranchers, told me about the homesteading; "It was a good deal for poor people."  It was probably easier to become rich as well, but most people did not achieve that by any means.  Also, for what its worth, it was easier to escape debt in the United States than it was in Europe, and many people did that.  If debt became too oppressive, they simply moved West, leaving their creditors behind.  That was a fairly common story.

Trying to get back to the period we typically look at here, the late 19th Century and the first half of the 20th Century, it would certainly be the case that there were many poor people (and there have, of course always been poor people) in North America.  During that period of time too, the US began to shift to an industrial economy as well.  The Frontier was regarded as officially "closed" by the Census Bureau, on a statistical basis, as early as 1890 and by the Presidential election of 1904 the concerns of farmers who were becoming increasingly unable to economically stay on the land were already a concern.  In towns and cities there were increasingly poor industrial classes, often, but not always, made up of desperately poor recent immigrants to the United States.  Of course, in the rural South an entire rural demographic at this time, blacks, were poor due to the history of that region.

 Typical 19th Century Nebraska homestead.

All of this is not to say that there were not poor people in the US from day one, but to try to attempt to define the character of poverty.  So, from early on, and stopping our consideration of the topic at about 1929 or so, there were poor in the country, but who were they?  Some were just folks down on their luck, but also there were large groups of recent immigrants who were poor due to their circumstances in other countries .  And there were, of course, American blacks, who had largely remained in poverty, and largely in the South as well at this point in time. Often, the poor were desperately poor, but they (again excluding blacks whose story is different in these regards) could look forward to escaping their poverty, or having their children escape it, relatively quickly.  In other words, as demographic groups, the immigrants weren't in a permanent condition of poverty, save for blacks, who largely were.  There was also a new poor class of industrial workers.  As we march into the 20th Century, we continued to see the escape valve of homesteading available to many, and many thousands used it (with quite a few failing).

 Rich and Poor. Two Christmas Dinners.  1873.

But in some ways, that raises the question we raised at the onset, and still haven't answered. That is what was poverty and who were the poor?  And what was the middle class?

It would seem fairly apparent that the middle class probably didn't recognize themselves as such until after World War One, although the term was clearly established by the Great Depression.  Prior to that, they probably just generally conceived of themselves as "average", or perhaps "doing well", and not "poor" or "rich".  Even now, defining these terms is difficult, except when you get to the extreme ends of the conditions.  As Jean Singleterry recently explored in her column in the Washington Post  the definition is surprisingly flexible even now.  The US government has a statistical definition of poverty as including families of four where the annual income basically falls below $25,000 per year, which undoubtedly would put a family in distress in modern times.  A common definition of middle class defines that class as falling between $24,000 and $100,000.  Probably a lot of people down at the $25,000 range, however, can legitimately consider themselves poor.  People making double the top figure of $100,000 probably don't generally regard themselves as rich.

Speaker in front of Congress urging Middle Class support for democracy, 1938.  The 1930s were the high water mark of socialist support in the US, which was never great, but which did spark fears in the Middle Class and Upper Classes that the Lower Class would find it appealing.

According to some other definitions, "middle class" isn't solely defined by income but largely by culture, but with a necessary education element, formal and informal, worked in. This view holds that the middle class are a group of people characterized by a level of education that allows them, or causes them, to have a certain outlook towards a large number of things.  In some ways, this view of the "middle class" gets back to Jefferson's view of the Yeoman, in that the view is that their well aware, interested in society and politics, generally fairly well educated, and have incomes that match the the rest.  If this view is correct it would necessarily mean that the modern poor have a different culture in some ways.

This view is, once again, the view that Singleterry takes in her recent article, in that she pointed out that both Presidential candidates are off the mark when they recollect their "poor" days.  With their respective educations at least, both were guaranteed to rise out of the bottom income level.  While NPR also recently ran a story on a Harvard Law graduate who ended up on the streets, Singleterry's point is very well taken.  With a Harvard Law degree it would be virtually impossible to be really poor unless a person worked at it or fell victim to highly odd, or perhaps self inflicted, circumstances.  Likewise, lest it seem that I'm picking just on Mr. Obama, it would also have been nearly impossible for Mitt Romney to be really poor, given his background and education.  Failure, in terms of these people, would have been remaining in the Middle Class.

 Girls employed crocheting in the days prior to labor laws.

Indeed, in an article that ran not all that long ago in the Casper Star Tribune, Mary Biliter, whose articles I generally don't really like (maudlin and self indulgent, in my view) made an interesting observation about a study she'd recently read which essentially stated, she claimed, that it was almost impossible for members of the Middle Class to fall out of it.  I meant to read that study, but have now lost the data on it.  I find that statement suspect, as I believe I've seen that actually occur in real life, and statistically it seems to be occurring to a lot of people, but there's probably something to it.  With a certain world outlook, including a long term outlook, certain shared values, and a certain education, formal and informal, they should have a general advantage.

 Young children of tenant farmer, working tobacco.

Which again gets me back, I think, to the point I started out with, or was trying to explore.   According to at least one knowledgeable person I know, "Middle Class" in earlier years lived much closer to that lower poverty line.  Indeed, the suggestion was made that most in the Middle Class lived near that line and had little in the way of surplus income, for the most part.  I suspect that's true.  Incomes were more stretched on the whole in earlier years.  Many fewer people made it up out of the Middle Class into the wealthy at all.  The economic vehicle into the Middle Class tended to be through labor of all types, and that labor was also shared in many instances by the poor, although perhaps on a less expansive or less skilled way.  And immigrant populations that made up large numbers of the poor were also those entering the Middle Class, so the cultural tie was strong.  Indeed, that strong cultural tie, where it existed, was a primary vehicle for assisting those classses out of poverty.

Skilled foundry worker, a middle class occupation, in the 1930s.

Well, this has been extraordinary rambling and probably exceedingly dull.  The point was to try to look at who we regard as poor, middle class, or rich in earlier eras, and it probably didn't work, other than to perhaps suggest that its sort of a complicated question.  I guess what we end up with, in the context of the time considered here, is that the Middle Class were poorer than they are today, the poor were as poor as they are today, or poorer, but demographic factors in that poverty were particularly predominant.  As discussed elsewhere, college education was very much less a factor in obtaining middle class status than it is now and that land provided a significant vehicle for many, which it has ceased to do today, as obtaining low cost agricultural land is an impossibility now.