Ungilded Hopes

BRIAN: And so today on the show, we’re looking at what this powerful, but elusive idea of the middle class has meant to past generations. When did the idea take hold? And how has is changed since then?

We’ll consider how consumption habits define class status all the way back in the colonial era. We’ll hear how the middle classes of the 19th century took shape in part by rejecting the ways of the rich. And we’ll ask what the civil rights movement had to do with the shifting nature of the black middle class in the early decades of the 20th century.

ED: But first, we’re going to return to that idea of the American Dream– or at least to its 19th century variant. Now, a lot of listeners may associate the final decades of the 19th century with the great rags to riches story. This was, after all, the era of famous industrialists who rose from humble beginnings, guys like John D Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

But Stanford historian Richard White says that most Americans in this era did not aspire to untold riches. Instead, they aspired to something they would have called competency. That meant that by the end of your life you would have enough– enough to live in comfort, maybe own a little property, provide for your children, and not worry that you could lose it all should something unexpected happen.

We invited Richard to explain this idea of competency a little more fully. So competent, we use that almost today as a backhanded competent. Oh, he’s very competent at his job. It’s not something you really want to hear about yourself, right? But can you tell me why they would call it competency?

RICHARD WHITE: Well, they would talk competency, because it meant your ability to take care of yourself and those who are dependent on. And it meant that you weren’t dependent on other people. So it comes out of this 19th century small “L” liberalism, that the whole goal in life is to have a series of relatively autonomous citizens, who in no matter what happened to them be able to meet the circumstances around them.

ED: So was is this a growing group in the 19th century? Would more and more people have found themselves competent?

RICHARD WHITE: They strived to be. I think many of its roots are agricultural. It goes back to a time when people had farms. And the aim of having a farm was not that you’re going to end up being a huge, wealthy person. The idea was in the end you’ll have accumulated enough land to be able to distribute it among your children, that they too can have farms. That there’ll be enough left that they’ll take care of you and your wife in old age.

And as people start moving off of farms, then competence becomes a more nebulous concept. Then we start talking about people who in the 19th century would be called the middling classes. We don’t have a sense of the middle class. But competence would extend to working people whose whole idea is to save enough from their wages, buy a house, put money aside, take care of their children. And if they could get through life and do that they considered themselves a success.

The aim of their working life was not to end up being a manager or a boss, let alone a capitalist. It was to be a successful and competent worker.

ED: Could a woman in the 19th century achieve competency?

RICHARD WHITE: That’s one of the things that women ask. And the answer would be in the late 19th century, yes, they could, but only if they didn’t marry. Because precisely there’s the quarrel over the control of property within marriage. And that’s why you’ll find that many professional women– I mean Jane Addams and others who were famous– they never will marry.

And there’s a lot of reasons for that. But one of them is the surrender of independence, which is simply part of attaining a competency.

ED: Now, they’re giving up that prospect of having a competency by joining their fate with a man. So if he doesn’t become competent, neither can they.

RICHARD WHITE: No, and Abigail Scott Duniway writes this famous suffrage memoir. And she loves her husband. But the guy just can’t make it. And it’s this constant complaint about she had tied herself to him. And he is just the stone the drags her down. And that happens to a lot of women.

ED: And this is also the time when there’s such massive immigration to the United States. And also the time, obviously, that African Americans in the South are trying to make their way in post-slave society, in which they’re trying to carve out something that America has to offer. So what would those folks think about this matrix of competency? Do they have a chance of making with it that?

RICHARD WHITE: They do. And I think the person who best expresses what they want, the chance they think should have, is Samuel Gompers, who becomes the first head of the American Federation of Labor. Actually, he’s their only head for a very long time.

And what he argues is what workers need is the ability to consume. And that the American economy depends on consumption. And what his slogan becomes is “more.” And by “more” he doesn’t, again, mean great wealth. He means enough that a worker can buy a house, he can decorate that house, have furniture in that house, can support a wife and children, has enough leisure to read books, read newspapers, participate in politics.

So “more,” the slogan of the American Federation of Labor, is in fact an extension of the old doctrine of competency, because what he’s asking for is even wage laborers deserve a competency, which is now going to be defined not so much in independence, because they’re working for wages, but in being paid enough that they can consume sufficiently to have the standard of living, which was assumed with a competency.

ED: It seems to me, too, Richard, that some of the major efforts of both immigrants and African Americans is to achieve a competency collaboratively by creating insurance companies and mutual burial societies. The very things that are cornerstones of competency, they decide our best bet is to give a nickel every week. And then when I die, somebody will bury me. Or that if I get sick, there is some other group to take care of me.

Is competency at tension with that? Or is this just another way of achieving competency?

RICHARD WHITE: Well, you bring up a very good point, because what this is the way in which competency become socialized. And Americans in the 19th century use the word socialism in a very different sense than we do. They can use it sometimes in the same way we do. But more often they use it in meaning as the opposite of individualism.

What they mean is in this large industrial society, they have to do what you just described. People have to cooperate. So the word cooperation is all over the 19th century. And it’s what we can’t achieve individually– the ends of a competency– we can achieve collectively.

ED: So later on, we would imagine the people who identified themselves as striving and middle class would of disdain socialism, because they would have seen that as something kind of dragging them down into the mass. But what you’re suggesting, Richard, is that there was a good chunk of time in the 19th century, when being competent, being middling was seen as a healthy thing, that what you didn’t want to do is fall into dependency below.

But what you’ve suggested was that their dream was not to abandon that great middling to become wealthy. And I’m sorry, that just violates everything we know about the Gilded Age and its name.

RICHARD WHITE: What you have is the very name Gilded Age– I mean, Mark Twain didn’t use the term to praise the age. I mean, he meant in fact to disparage the age and ridicule the age. The whole thing was there was this gilding of wealth, but beneath this was this corrupt center.

So that the problem was that they recognized some people are getting wealthy beyond their wildest imaginings. But those people are disparaged. Those people are feared. Those people are seen as dangerous.

People don’t praise Jay Gould in the late 19th century. Cornelius Vanderbilt is not a popular hero. John D Rockefeller is not somebody who they want to emulate.

What you find is these people are somehow anomalies in the system and signs that the system’s going wrong, that the country itself was conceived as this vast middling society. And you’re perfectly right. They feared the poor. But they also fear the rich just as much.

So I think if we would be puzzled by the Gilded Age, the Gilded Age would be utterly bewildered by us, because we seem to be evolving into the kind of society that they most feared, a society with a small but very wealthy group of people who exercise an inordinate control over all aspects of society. And another group of people who are feared as being too poor to share the values.

That’s what the Gilded Age was afraid would happen to the United States. So the Gilded Age was about that middling. And that’s what they were seeking to keep.

ED: So Richard, when this middle class of post World War II America emerges, what happens to the ideals of competency? Are those transformed in some way? Or do they fall away? Where are they today?

RICHARD WHITE: The idea of competency doesn’t die quickly. I think it continues on through the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. And if you look at the last presidential campaign, both Romney and Obama we’re trying to stake out a ground of fairness, a ground of equity, a ground of people having an equal chance, and to cut into this beliefs that the very rich those who control institutions have stacked the game.

And I think what they’re appealing to is the remnants of this old idea. That someplace in the American public, I think, still is the idea of that the real purpose of this country is to produce it relatively equal citizens, where people have a fair chance. If you work hard, there will be a reward. I don’t think that idea is dead.

But I do think the kind of thing I see in many of my students at Stanford, this desire to be wealthy beyond– at least my wildest imaginings– by the time they’re 30. That is quite real now. But I’d also say it’s quite new. I don’t remember that in my own life until quite recently. And I don’t see it that often in American history.

ED: Richard, thank you so much for helping us understand this broad sweep of a central concept in American history.

RICHARD WHITE: I’ve enjoyed it. It’s always good talking to.

ED: Richard White is a history professor at Stanford University. We’ll post a longer version of our conversation at backstoryradio.org.

PETER: It’s time for a short break, but don’t go away. When we get back, a kinder, gentler version of the board game Monopoly that you’ll never have the opportunity to play.