Middle Ground

ED: Brian, Peter, it seem that Neil’s question is one that has kind of haunted this entire show. What does it mean to have middle class identity and status if you can’t pass it on? I mean, is this something that we’ve discovered now? Or has this been there all along?

PETER: No, Ed, I think it’s a great question and it goes back to the very beginning. Neil talked about independence, a keyword. He was talking about the black community under conditions of segregation not dependent on white as a marker middle class, black identity.

Well, go back to the American Revolution. It’s all about the independence of Americans– not just America– of Americans. And that independence is predicated on the way the economy works and on the way you can sustain your family and pass on land and opportunity to your children.

And it’s an overwhelmingly agricultural society, so at the beginning it’s framed in terms of land ownership. But there’s always a problem with that independence. And that is that it is insecure and vulnerable.

What if you lose that property? You could lose the property because of taxation or because you go into debt, because you’re not truly independent.

BRIAN: Or because the railroad doesn’t happen to go where you are.

PETER: That’s right. So the original American dream, it seems to me, is to sustain independence as conditions change. And change is the very condition of being in America. There’s a tremendous amount of mobility, both a vertical– that is up and down– horizontal, moving from space to space.

ED: Yeah, and it only gets less settled in the 19th century. Everything is just completely scrambled, Peter. Not only do you have all these questions about land and railroads, but the whole continent is kind of flooded with immigrants and resettle.

So, Brian, we have the paradox, ironically, that the 20th century seems so filled with anxiety, seems to have lots of tools suddenly available for the middle class to secure itself in a way that we didn’t have before. Are we maybe more stable than we use to be?

BRIAN: Yes. I’ll bet you didn’t expect such a definitive answer, Ed. And I think that’s exactly the problem. I think for much of the 20th century we expected to be able to pass on middle class status to our kids. We expected that our kids would be able to own a home of their own, even if we couldn’t. We expected our kids to get a college education, even if we didn’t have one.

And so to answer Neil’s question, I think that this is a very recent question by 20th century and 21st century standards. It’s only in the last 20 to 30 years that suddenly a college education seems out of reach. And it’s only in the last 30 years that we have seen home ownership by the younger sorts– let’s say 25 to 35-year-olds– decline precipitously.

Things that we simply took for granted as being passed on as a birthright, if you will, of being middle class are now suddenly very open to question. And not so secure a la the world that Peter and you, Ed, described.

PETER: Yeah, Brian, I think that’s exactly right. There are all kinds of safety nets out there. But they look frayed now.

And what we’ve discovered, I think, is that the independence we thought we had as middle class people was actually interdependence, multiple dependencies. And we see how tenuous those dependencies are. And how fragile the prospects of our own children are because of those fraying nets, that lack of opportunities.

So you got a good education, got a PhD, for instance. What good does that do you?

BRIAN: Ed, what’s interesting is how new those nets are that are already fraying. I think that people of the 18th and 19th centuries would say, what are you guys worried about? Things have never been stable. You’ve never been secure in your identity in America. And for 15 or 20 years after World War II, you guys made up all this machinery you thought was going to keep middle class society going forever. It’s already breaking down. Welcome to American history.

ED: That’s going to do it for us today. But we’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s show. Our email is BackStory@Virginia.edu. You can also leave a comment on our website. And while you’re there, take a moment to weigh in on our upcoming shows. They include episodes on the history of trash and of religious renewal.

We really do value your input. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

PETER: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Earnest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gadek, and Robert Armengol. Jamal Millner is our engineer. We had help from Kahlil [? Elhi. ?] Special thanks this week to Nathan Connolly and Jenny [? Goliveway. ?] BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham

BRIAN: Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding was provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

MALE ANNOUNCER: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.