In the work of W. Lloyd Warner and his associates, we are offered a full-scale theory of the nature and effect of class distinctions in American society, a theory which has already begun to influence practices in such fields as education and industrial relations. Walter R. Goldschmidt here examines the social and moral implications of Warner’s work.
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It is a primary function of any religion to explain and justify society to the population, and in societies where religious belief is wanting, it falls to popular philosophy to discover some rational order in social relationships and institutions. In the modern world, with its faith in science, the rationalization must be couched in scientific terms and supported by the paraphernalia of the sciences; thus the task of explaining the social system is taken over by sociology and the academic study of American social life. But such rationalizations have more than an academic significance—once stated, they may themselves play an important role in influencing society by confirming existing tendencies.
The new sociology of social class in America, as it is being developed by W. Lloyd Warner and his many students, serves as more than a mere description or reflection of our order. Bringing to the study of class a particular point of view, it bids fair to help mold the class system of our society according to a set pattern, in line not only with what Warner sees, but with what he preconceives as fitting and proper. Nature is said sometimes to copy art; society perhaps copies artifice. For this reason the meaning and impact of Warner’s views are doubly worth critical examination; and particularly must we examine the moral ideology implicit in the theoretical foundation of this class analysis.
Mr. Warner is a professor of anthropology and education at the University of Chicago. He is among those anthropologists who have turned from the exotic and obscure—in his case the Australian blackfellow—to the immediate and everyday. (See Robert Endleman, “The New Anthropology and Its Ambitions,” COMMENTARY, September 1949). Specifically he studied the American community, vigorously, repeatedly, and with single-minded purpose. He spent several years, aided by a platoon of graduate students, codifying the lives of the people of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and has thus far published four volumes on them (The Social Life of a Modern Community, 1941; The Status System of a Modern Community, 1942; The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups, 1945; and The Social System of the Modern Factory, 1947, all put out by Yale University Press under the general title of “The Yankee City Series”). He has also made or supported studies in the South (Deep South, by Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner), the Middle West (Elmtown’s Youth, by A. B. Hollingshead, and Democracy in Jonesville, by W. L. Warner), and among the Negroes in Chicago (Black Metropolis, by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton). To date he has himself been author or co-author of eight books on the American social system. More than that, his underlying hypothesis has been adopted by independent workers as a source of academic inspiration.
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What is the Warner thesis? It is that American society is not the warm clime of equality and social freedom it is advertised to be, but is divided into clearly distinguishable social classes, six in number. The hypothesis was developed in Warner’s study of Newburyport, where he codified the social lives and economic activities of the whole population: “We worked out empirically, by direct observation of a fairly large sample of the total population, the existence of six stratified classes.”
Though he had originally postulated a direct relation between social status and economic position, Warner found that in the estimate of a person’s rank by others in the community, non-economic criteria were brought to bear. These criteria seemed to include the ability to “act right,” knowing how to spend money, associating with the right people, area of residence, the length of time a family had resided in town, and membership in various formal associations. Warner defined the classes set up by these criteria as follows: “By class is meant two or more orders of people who are believed to be, and are accordingly ranked by the members of the community, in socially superior and inferior positions. Members of a class tend to marry within their own order, but the values of the society permit marriage up and down. A class system also provides that children are born in the same status as their parents. A class society distributes rights and privileges, duties and obligations, unequally among its inferior and superior grades. A system of classes . . . provides by its own values for movement up and down the social ladder.” (The Social Life of a Modern Community.)
One of Warner’s most recent books is a detailed statement of the method by which one determines any person’s class position. Here he develops two basic techniques, the Evaluated Participation (E.P.) technique and the Index of Status Characteristics (I.S.C.). The first “is posed on the proposition that those who interact in the social system of a community evaluate the participation of those around them, that the place where the individual participates is evaluated, and that the members of the community are explicitly or implicitly aware of the ranking and translate their evaluations of social participation into social class ratings that can be communicated to the investigator.” (W. Lloyd Warner, Marchia Meeker, and Kenneth Eells, Social Class in America, 1949). In the final analysis, this means that a person’s class position is determined by the verbalized statements of “intelligent and observant” citizens of the community, substantiated as well as possible by a detailed record of social intercourse which shows “who has to do with whom.”
The second method (I.S.C.) is simpler, and assumes that a person’s class position may be approximated without discovering his social associates but simply by ascertaining four facts about him: his occupation, his source of income, the type of home in which he lives, and the residence area in which it is located. Each of these facts is rated on a 7-point scale. The occupational categories are carefully worked out, and the subject’s score is determined not only by the major classes of occupation (business, professional, farm, skilled labor, unskilled labor) but also by the size of the enterprise in which he is engaged and his particular type of work. A subject’s rating on the “sources of income” scale is determined by whether his income derives from (1) inherited wealth, (2) earned wealth, (3) profits and fees, (4) salary, (5) wages, (6) private relief, or (7) public relief. The evaluation of homes is based upon their size and condition, while the “residence area” credit has to be established separately for each community.
Though the criteria appear precise, one is not always certain just how they are applied. Thus, in his earlier work Warner indicates a rather subjective procedure: “If a person was a member of several charitable organizations, a social club or two, and possibly an occupational association, but not of a fraternal lodge, and he was not considered a member of the new or old families of Hill Streeters, it was more likely that he was upper-middle class. A small amount of interviewing soon demonstrated whether this was true or not.” (The Social Life of a Modern Community.)
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By such methods Warner and his students are able to divide a community into the classes that make it up; in the Newburyport study, the classes are characterized as follows:
Upper-upper (1.4 per cent): those with a long history of high standing in the community; those who make aristocratic claims.
Lower-upper (1.6 per cent): persons of wealth and importance, but not fully accepted by the top class because of the “newness” of the wealth.
Upper-middle (10.2 per cent): chiefly business entrepreneurs and the “pillars of society.”
Lower-middle (28.1 per cent): chiefly white-collar workers, minor business people, and the more highly skilled workers; these are the “top of the level of the Common Man.”
Upper-lower (32.6 per cent): chiefly skilled laborers, the “poor but honest workmen.”
Lower-lower (25.2 per cent): the unskilled, the semi-permanently unemployed.
As John P. Marquand suggests in his novel Point of No Return, Warner has reduced a complex status hierarchy and an intricate set of personal relationships to a system. His classes are based upon the general awareness of social standing and upon local names for certain kinds of social position as indicative of social prestige. Whether they may properly be called “classes” is a question which professional sociologists have raised. Except for the upper groups, for example, they are not self-conscious entities with group identification and loyalty on the part of their members, like the estates of European society. Nor are they classes in the politico-economic sense; indeed, while Warner notes that the classes differ in authority and power, he nowhere relates his classes to the power system of the community.
We need not here examine further the methodological and theoretical problems involved in Warner’s work; my purpose is to examine its moral implications.
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The story of “Big Sister,” a daytime radio serial, will demonstrate how Warner’s sociology impinges on the moral and political. Warner and a psychologist from the University of Chicago recently studied the effect of the soap opera on the middle-class woman (W. Lloyd Warner and William E. Henry, “The Radio Day-time Serial: A Symbolic Analysis,” Genetic Psychology Monographs, Vol. 37, February 1948). This study is addressed strictly to the academic fraternity and utilizes the apparatus of scientific investigation. The sixty-odd subjects of the analysis were selected from the lower-middle class (those scoring 4.5 on Mr. Warner’s Index of Status Characteristics), or, in Warner’s terms, the level of the Common Man (the capitalization is Warner’s). These women, we are told, are economically dependent upon their husbands; their world is limited to the dreary confines of their homes; their moral code is strict and repressive. By use of the Thematic Apperception Test, in which the subject projects his personality in narratives he makes up about standardized pictures, the authors show that the subjects are psychologically restricted, unimaginative, and anxious. Anxiety is called forth particularly by the subjects’ relations with other people in the narrow world they inhabit, that is, with their husbands, their children, and the actual or anticipated “other woman.”
It is into such lives that “Big Sister” comes, in various guises, throughout the day, five days a week. As the writers who grind out the material well know, they are dramatizing in large the petty annoyances, the minor crises, the sorrows and frustrations of these lower-middleclass women. To solve these problems, they re-create the image of the woman in the form of a heroine in simple-but-stylish armor, who slays the dragons of evil and strengthens the weak. Warner and Henry call these stories our “latter-day morality plays.”
The authors “discover little or nothing to confirm” the attacks that psychiatrists and the public press have made on such programs. Indeed, they found that the programs “functioned very much like a folk tale, expressing the hopes and fears of their female audience, and on the whole contributed to the integration of their lives into the world in which they lived.” And this solace is important: “Therein lie hope and confidence for those who listen to daytime serials and, it is not too much to say, for our culture. The women of the level of the Common Man carry the heavy load of tradition and convention wherein are stored our most treasured beliefs and valued sentiments. . . . It is no accident that these women are rigidly trained and are under constant constraint, for our cultural stability and the continuance of our way of life are greatly dependent upon them.”
A group of five middle-class career women were studied as a contrast or “control.” These women were found to be freer in their emotional life than the other women studied; not subject to the same “subordination, limitations and strict routines.” They were persons with more control over their social environment; and they were not persons who habitually listened to the radio daytime serials. Indeed, they found the stories to be essentially unreal; the characters too transparent to serve as models for conduct; and the drama incapable of offering a formula by which they could meet their own problems. The authors say that this control group is more subject to neuroses and imply that their incapability of accepting a clearly structured image of their role, as offered by “Big Sister,” is a major factor in their neurotic vulnerability.
What the authors are saving is that the soap operas give the lower-middle-class woman a psychological support in her deprived social position. “The listeners had confidence in the future and believed that moral strength and social astuteness would solve all problems. . . . The effect of the ‘Big Sister’ program is to direct their hopes into confident and optimistic channels.” That these channels were essentially unrealistic in terms of the everyday life of the women at the level of the Common Man, is viewed neither as damaging to them nor detrimental to their (and our) social world.
If American society is made up of fixed social classes with varying prestige and social satisfactions, then it follows that any social device which renders life within the class more tolerable is necessarily good. Such seems to be the line of reasoning that leads Warner and Henry to approve of “Big Sister.” But if one sees the social situation as more dynamic, if one regards as unhealthy for democracy the existence of a body of people who accept a dream situation and apathy, then the daytime radio serial is harmful to the extent that it perpetuates such a pattern.
It would seem obvious that the authors’ belief that the effect of a radio daytime serial is “good” reflects a morality implicit in the class theory that underlies the study. The character of this underlying morality comes out even more forcefully when Warner and his students treat two more crucial areas of American life.
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Warner is currently associated with a group engaged in research for indusrial organization, but has published only one work in the field. This is the fourth volume of his “Yankee City Series” (W. Lloyd Warner and J. O. Low, The Social System of the Modern Factory), where the authors endeavor to explain the outbreak of a successful strike and the subsequent unionization of the shoe industry in Newburyport in 1933.
Giving full recognition to the extreme economic pressures of that depression period, and to the effect of international markets upon the local industries, they are nevertheless impressed with the uniqueness of the situation: “When searching for the answers to why such significant new changes could occur in Yankee City, the evidence is clear that economic factors are of prime importance. But before we are content to accept them as the only answers to our problems, let us once more remind ourselves (1) that there had been severe depressions and low wages before and the unions had failed to organize the workers, and (2) that the last and most powerful strike which preceded the present one occurred not in a depression but during a boom period. . . . Other factors are necessary and must be found if we are to understand the strike. . . .”
These other factors are found in the depersonalization of the industry, the lowered demand for skill in carrying out manufacturing operations, the diminished social standing of the workers, their lessened sense of community participation, and the lack of opportunity for individuals to rise in the job hierarchy. In short, industrialization had taken place.
A strike by its very nature involves a division into two camps, inevitably in opposition, and clashing over the distribution of power. Warner is aware that the issue is one of control and power: “In the first period [of the strike], when management and the unions fought desperately to gain control over the workers, the union was successful in organizing the workers, and management was prevented from gaining control.” He is aware that the unions were conscious of the need to organize workers as a group against factory owners as a group, for he notes that strikers were placed on picket lines of shops in which they were not employed so that the workers would sense that the fight was “against factory owners in general and not . . . against factory owners in a particular plant.” And management, Warner notes, discriminates against educated workers because “individuals of the two lower classes make more docile employees.”
But the essential dynamic in this whole situation, to Warner, is that the shoe workers were not getting the “non-economic” satisfactions of status and prestige that would keep them happy and satisfied in their powerless roles. He notes with alarm that the shoe workers have fewer social contacts among the people in the three top classes than other members of their class. It is this which troubles him, not that they have no control over management, and it is this social situation of workers which is “a cause for deep concern.” “What is denied [the workers] as individuals in working relations, they have sought to gain by collective action through union membership. . . . The shoe worker’s sense of security is enhanced by the knowledge that he and his kind are firmly banded together to defend their common interests against the conflicting interests of the owner-management group. . . . Membership in a labor union also gives the shoe operative an opportunity to compete for prestige by election or appointment to office in the union.”
Finally, extending this principle to the general American scene, Warner and Low say: “It can be assumed that this blocking of mobility in industry should result in strengthening the two opposing forces, separating them further, and increasing the number of clashes between them. The frustrations of ‘ambitious workers’ trying to rise in the world and take their families with them are the source of common grievances against those above. The decreasing sense of worth and significance on the job felt by all workers adds to the feeling of being stopped by someone or something that is against them. Part of the great strength of labor unions in the United States can be traced to these factors. The unions act as agents to express the common hopes—and bitterness—of the workers.”
This is an interesting and rather special view of the role of industrial conflict in our society. The issue is not, as we might have thought, that the workers want more leisure and higher income, more security now and in old age, but rather that they are not getting “social satisfactions.” And the unions, in fighting for the former rather than the latter, are ignoring the nub of the problem. Thus the way is opened to the suggestion that workers might be satisfied not by increased material gains, but by increased rewards in prestige.
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This was the view of Elton Mayo, the late professor of industrial research in the Harvard School of Business Administration, which sponsored the study of Newburyport. Professor Mayo, on the basis of a famous study of the Hawthorne plant of the General Electric Company which showed that workers responded with increased output to the special attention they received when they were singled out for research, had suggested that the worker is not concerned primarily with economic rewards. He is rather seeking social satisfaction, and will find more of it in spontaneously organized groups binding those of common background than in special organizations based upon economic interests. Mayo himself found the salvation of society to lie in an administrative elite, organizing production to give the workers these social satisfactions.
Mr. Warner not only accepts Mayo’s view of industrial relations, but with his six-class system gives it an elaborate and convincing rationalization. If the six classes are the basic structure of American society, and the desire to rise from one class to another is its fundamental dynamic, then union organization is an extraneous agent which can offer only surrogate satisfaction, not the real rewards of prestige and belonging. We then see how important it is to divorce the status system from economics. If class position and the prestige it grants were simply dependent on income, then it would be impossible to deny the overriding importance of economic considerations in the workers’ role as employee. By suggesting that the desire of the workers is actually to achieve acceptance quite independent of economics, the main function of the union is shown to be beside the point.
Finally, the multi-class system denies the reality of a clash of interests; it substitutes the pleasant notion of a hierarchy, in which each person finds his proper God-given place, for the cruder reality of a quite irrational existing divergence in income and power, with all its inequities and frustrations but subject to betterment through individual and group rebellion and struggle. And it is this acceptance of the social hierarchy, it appears from a close reading of Warner, that he offers as the solution to the problem of class in America—not the effort to reduce the differences of power and income between different classes. Thus: “There are many who believe the increasing power exercised by the political, economical, and associational organizations of the workers will result in an equalitarian society. The present writers do not share this opinion.”
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It is on the public school systems of America that the class theory of Warner has had its greatest impact. American educators are notoriously eager for technical gadgets, and the Warner scheme (brought to their attention in Who Shall Be Educated?, 1944, a book by Warner, Robert J. Havighurst, and Martin B. Loeb, and in countless articles) has appealed to them just as much as intelligence tests, personality inventories, and sociometrics: each has had its vogue and left its mark on the field.
The first result of Warner’s impact was a healthy one. It made teachers aware of a dimension in their schoolroom that they have tended to overlook—the existence of status variations and their implications for the behavior and performance of the child. If Johnny is doing poorly, it may be a matter not of IQ, but of I.S.C. A discipline problem may only reflect the usual behavior of the “lower-lower” class. This symbolic naming may not solve the problem, but it is comforting and illuminating.
Now Warner is keenly aware of the crucial role that education plays in all societies and of the jealously guarded social democracy of the American public school. He and his associates have constantly emphasized the importance of the school as the main channel by which the bright and the enterprising of the lower classes can rise. If finding one’s proper place in the hierarchy is the main solution to the problem of inequality, then the public school plays the important role of selecting and fitting individually promising young people of the lower classes for advancement. At the same time, the schools must serve to maintain the culture of the society, including its social organization. So the school in Warner’s system plays a dual role: On the one hand, “it provides a general education for democratic living,” and, on the other, “it trains children to fit into our class order” (W. Lloyd Warner, .”Educative Effects of Social Status,” Environment and Education, Supplementary Educational Monographs, 1942).
Warner has great faith in democracy, which consists, in his view, in individual achievement and personal aggrandizement in a relatively static, status-ordered, social universe; and he properly abhors the notion that a person should be forced to a lesser position than his endowments warrant. But this raises the question of the school’s proper duty to the rest, to those who will not rise. The issue has led to a controversy between two of the sociologists who have accepted the Warner concept of class.
Allison Davis (“Child Training and Social Class,” in Barker, Kounin, and Wright, Child Behavior and Development, 1943) points out that the schools are dominated by middle-class values, and that the lower-class child learns the habits of the classes above him, the rewards of their way of life, and the deprivations of the low status that threatens him; it is therefore proper for the school system to encourage the striving for middle-class goals on the part of the lower-class student, and it should help him to higher personal status.
Celia Stendler, in Children of Brasstown, attacks this time-honored tradition of school-aided social advancement. Status-striving provokes anxiety and neurosis, and it would be better if the children of “Brasstown” did not have unrealistic temptations held before them, but learned to accept their role as foundry workers and adjust to its demands.
The dilemma is certainly a difficult one. Should we ask the lower-class child to put all his hopes on his chances of social advancement, as Allison Davis proposes, risking the psychological harm that comes with failure, or should we teach him to reconcile himself to a position that is socially unsatisfying and economically unrewarding?
But perhaps this dilemma is only a creation of the Warner thesis, and there is a third way out. For the dilemma depends on Warner’s assumption of the uniformity of the value system, that the only social satisfaction available to the individual in our society is that gained by climbing the social ladder. It thus denies the possibility that the schools might educate pupils to the recognition of values other than social advancement, and, more significantly, it ignores the possibility of making the working population aware of the dignity and value of labor, or of its unity of interests and its possibilities of increasing its economic rewards as a group. Cannot a society give some more realistic satisfaction to all its groups than the mere drugged acceptance of the lot in society to which the individual was born? Is it impossible that those who make up the major part of the unfortunately named “lower class”—that is, workers—should increase their income, their control over their fate, and the importance of their role in society, so that, as workers, they will not be doomed to bitterness and frustration?
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If Warner’s studies were merely the reports of scientists observing some segment of the universe and reporting their unhappy findings, then the question of the underlying morality could not arise. For it is a tenet of science that no fact should be avoided because it presents an unhappy reality. But Warner cannot plead this scientific immunity. Too frequently he has deserted his laboratory bench for the pulpit; his evangelism is manifest. This is not in itself a fault; in this age the scientist has searched his soul, and frequently taken his message before an agnostic public, and no one can criticize him for wishing to do so. But the evangelist, unlike the scientist, must be scrutinized both for the validity of his message and for its moral implications.
That Warner is exhorting the American public to act in terms of his class system can readily be demonstrated from one of his most recent volumes, Social Class in America. This book is addressed to the lay—that is, non-scientific—public. The very tone of the writing—the studied simplicity of style, the advice to skip the more turgid sections, the capitalization of each concept—these are all hallmarks. And here Warner writes: “It is the hope of the author that this book will provide a corrective instrument which will permit men and women better to evaluate their social situations and thereby better adapt themselves to social reality and fit their dreams and aspirations to what is possible.”
He promises to provide “effective and simple techniques of studying and applying the social-class concept so that those who are not specialized class analysts can apply such knowledge to the practical problems of their business or profession. . . .” Again, he writes that “status plays a decisive role in the formation of personality at the various stages of development, for if young people are to learn to live adaptively as mature people in our society they must be trained by the informal controls of our society to fit into their places.” He recommends the volume specifically to teachers and school administrators, to business management, sales organizations, and advertisers.
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Warner’s approval of the function of soap opera in the American social system, his approach to industrial relations, his approach to the dilemma of democratic education in a class society—all this follows, not from the recognized facts of status differentiation and social variation, but from the implicit and unexamined assumption that the classes are fixed, in the sense that they are relatively permanent in their major outlines, and that most, though not all, persons will remain in the class to which they were born. People must “fit into their places” because Warner assumes that the places will always be there, and nothing will happen to elim inate some and add others, or to make those that are pleasant today unpleasant in the future, and vice versa. The democracy in this class system—and to me it seems a peculiar version of democracy—consists only in the opportunity for an individual, if he is sufficiently endowed, sufficiently motivated, and sufficiently lucky, to move upward. Otherwise, he had best adjust to the narrow dimensions of his social position. It is natural for those at the top to rule, it is implied, not because they necessarily have certain objective capacities, but simply because they belong to the “upper-upper” or “lower-upper” class.
We must distinguish between what is correct and what is questionable in this hypothesis. Differences in riches and prestige have been a characteristic of American culture since it began. That this differentiation involves considerations of wealth, family connections, and occupations, certainly cannot be denied. That people of like position associate with each other, are snobbish to those “beneath” them and deferential to those “above,” is also hardly a new discovery.
It is essentially Warner’s static concept of society—of the privileges, power, and characteristics of the different classes—that seems to me questionable. Democracy is not merely a political matrix which permits the strong to demonstrate their strength. It is an institutional system which attempts to preserve the balance between significant and divergent segments of the population, making it possible that Warner’s “level of the Common Man” shall also be able to exert its proper influence in community decisions over against the powers of the “elite.” In industrial affairs, it involves the protection of the worker through unionization and popular restraint upon the powers of an increasingly centralized management.
Warner limits his attention to the single end of social status and the particular means of individual action; that the group itself may have certain aims as a group does not occur to him—and it does not occur to him because in advance he conceives of lower-class individuals as helpless entities who are to be “fitted in” from above. Education, in Warner’s analysis, serves only the status-seeking function; he cannot appreciate the direct satisfactions of education because he does not allow for values other than those which confer status. So the school system and the radio program can play no role in encouraging social solidarity and group action as means of improving the life chances of the impoverished; they can only assist the individual to rise in the status system, or, contrariwise, to adjust to the two-dimensional prison of the status ladder.
The danger of this narrow thesis lies in its popular appeal, and in the fact that it takes on the character of a pseudo-scientific ideology supporting the idea of control by the elite. As such, it may well become a force for the actual development of what it purports to have discovered: a fixed class system.
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