William Petersen here reports on some of the most important studies that have been published by American sociologists in recent years, measuring the extent of American social mobility—the chances in our system for the individual to “rise out of his class” in income, occupation, and status. These studies seriously challenge convictions that have been enshrined in textbooks and have served as the basis for extensive analyses of American society, and they challenge the clichés of daily conversation as well.
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A popular cliché has it that it is harder nowadays for a young man to get ahead in this country than it was, say, fifty or seventy-five years ago. Both the public and social scientists tend to agree that opportunities for advancement are now more limited, that class lines have become more rigid, that what sociologists term “social mobility” has been slowing down, that our society is becoming frozen. This consensus is remarkable in that it lacks the support of any really convincing facts. If anyone has questioned it—and hardly anyone has since the depression—this very lack of relevant data has permitted scholars and laymen to shrug the questioner off and continue holding on to their assumption that the Horatio Alger pattern is now obsolete.
Quite suddenly, the past two years have produced some authoritative material on the true situation. Only since then have the first reliable studies of social mobility in the United States been made, and these studies, whatever their faults and limitations, now make available for the first time data on which to base a serious judgment as to how fluid the American class structure is.
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There are two rather different ways in which you can study social mobility: you can compare the occupations of sons with those of their fathers, and see whether they are lower or higher on the social scale; or you can trace the movements of individuals through their various occupations, and determine whether they have been going up or down on that scale.1 Let us begin with the first.
The most important of these studies was conducted by Natalie Rogoff, and is about to appear in book form (Recent Trends in Occupational Mobility, The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois). Applications for marriage licenses in Marion County, Indiana, which includes the city of Indianapolis and its suburbs, ask the prospective groom to give his father’s as well as his own occupation, and this made an invaluable mine of data on social mobility available. Miss Rogoff analyzed all the Marion County marriage licenses for each of two periods, 1905-12 and 1938-41 (there were about 10,000 in each period), and could thus compare mobility before the First World War with that just before the Second World War. By a special device she also distinguished between two types of mobility—that resulting from changes in occupational structure (for example, if there is an increase in the percentage of white-collar positions and a decrease in the percentage of farm jobs one may expect fewer sons than fathers to be fanners, and more to be white-collar workers); and that resulting from the openness of opportunity in general. From her study, therefore, we can see whether there has been more or less social mobility than can be accounted for by changes in the country’s occupational structure.
Apart from these changes—in themselves enormous, and leading to a decline in the number of low-status occupations and an increase in the number of high-status occupations— Rogoff found overall social mobility to be essentially the same in 1940 as it was in 1910. There were some differences, however, as regards individual occupational groups; in particular, mobility into the “professionals,” the highest group, had increased by about a quarter over the thirty-year period (that is to say, apart from the increase in professional positions, the number of sons in the professions who did not have fathers in the professions increased by one-quarter). In both periods, the rate of mobility was higher between white-collar occupational groups, as well as between manual groups, than between the two broad classes. The major barrier to both upward and downward mobility was found to lie between skilled workers and lower white-collar employees, between manual jobs and non-manual positions, between “hand” and “head” work.
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The second study of social mobility over more than one generation was made in quite a different kind of community—Oakland, an industrial town across the bay from San Francisco —by Seymour M. Lipset, Reinhard Bendix, and F. Theodore Malm.2 They interviewed the principal wage-earner in a random sample of 955 Oakland households (excluding the very highest and lowest socio-economic neighborhoods). Analysis was concentrated on a comparison of the sons of fathers who had spent most of their lives as manual workers with the sons of fathers who had spent most of their lives in non-manual work.
The results were startling. Of the sons of fathers who had spent most of their lives as manual workers, 47 per cent were working in non-manual occupations, as compared with 68 per cent of the sons of fathers who had spent most of their lives in non-manual occupations. The 21 per cent difference between these two figures measures the sum of all the obstacles, hereditary or cultural, that face the workingclass boy who tries to cross the widest gap in the American class structure. In addition, almost half the sons of fathers who had done mostly manual work, and who at the time of this study were themselves doing manual work, had spent some parts of their careers in nonmanual occupations.
These two studies are based on only two American communities, but their general conclusions are supported by two nationwide surveys of the occupations of sons and fathers. One of these surveys was made by the Office of Public Opinion Research of Princeton University in 1945, the other by the National Opinion Research Center in 1947. According to both these studies, about a third of the respondents were in the same occupational group as their fathers; somewhat more than a third were in a higher group; and a bit less than a third in a lower group. This rather high rate of downward mobility was in part a reflection of the fact that many of the respondents were still quite young, and some could be expected to rise later to a higher group.
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What about social mobility as measured within an individual’s occupational career, rather than in relation to his father’s occupation? The Oakland survey is the only major study of this kind of mobility, and while this fast-growing city (its population increased by more than a quarter between 1940 and 1950) cannot be taken as typical of the country as a whole, it does offer an index to the degree of social mobility in places where the American economy is expanding most rapidly.
When the Oakland respondents were classified according to the occupational groups (in addition to their present ones) in which they had worked, the data showed a variety of job experience that the authors term “staggering.” A man who had begun in one occupational group and had remained there, without ever holding a job in another, was definitely atypical. On the other hand, most of this mobility was limited in range. Thus those who now had manual jobs had spent 80 per cent of their working careers in the manual class, and those now holding non-manual positions had spent 75 per cent of their careers in the non-manual class. Since in agreement with Rogoff the authors stress that the gap between manual and non-manual work is the widest in the American class structure, the converse of these figures is also relevant: manual workers had spent onefifth of their occupational careers in non-manual positions, and white-collar workers one-quarter of theirs in manual jobs. Or, even more startling, 47 per cent of the manual workers had done white-collar work at some time, and 62 per cent of the white-collar workers had worked with their hands at some time.
Lipset and Bendix made a special analysis of the manner in which the gap between manual and non-manual work was crossed. Most workers who moved into the white-collar class had either set up their own small businesses or got low-status jobs, most often as salesmen. One reason for this is obvious: small business and selling are the two activities in which a person with a limited education tends to be least handicapped. More generally, education is one of the most important of the factors that shape the seemingly chaotic picture of social mobility. Thus, farmers’ sons migrating to town are typically handicapped by their inferior schooling and tend to enter the urban labor market at or near the bottom. At the other extreme, professionals typically require a long period of rather specialized education and apprenticeship. Nevertheless, Rogoff’s study showed that mobility into the professional group has increased fastest over the past generation; and virtually all professionals, according to Lipset and Bendix, have spent part of their working careers in other occupations, in many cases probably while they were attending school.
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All these studies assume that change in occupation is an index to social mobility but, as we have pointed out, this is only an approximate measure. Yet if we use income as the index, the results turn out the same. It is generally recognized that the national income of the United States has risen and is continuing to rise, with per capita income regularly increasing at a well-nigh incredible rate of over 2 per cent annually. It has been repeatedly stated, however, that, while average income has risen, this trend has been largely countered by one toward polarization, which drains the middleincome group off into the groups above and below it. “The rich get richer, and the poor poorer.” So far as the long-term perspective is concerned, this view can be founded on nothing but ideological preconceptions, for it has no data to support it.
After a diligent search, I was able to find only one study of income distribution that went back into the 19th century. In this unique work, the economist Rufus Tucker (“The Distribution of Income among Income Taxpayers in the United States, 1863-1935,” Quarterly journal of Economics, Vol. 52, August 1938) used government statistics on income-tax payments, which are available, with interruptions, from 1863 on. He converted the designated incomes into 1929 dollars, and calculated the percentage of the population that fell into various income groups in each of the years for which data were available. While the method itself was too rough to delineate any but gross differences, Tucker’s general conclusions seem to be well based:
Income is now [1935] much less concentrated in the United States than it was during and just after the Civil War. Although very wealthy persons are more numerous now than then, the number of persons of moderate incomes has increased more than the number of very wealthy persons, [and] the average purchasing power of wage-earners has increased gready. . . . The members of the upper-income classes are a constantly shifting lot. The income-tax statistics as they stand give very little support to the idea of a hereditary plutocracy. . . . It is very difficult to maintain fortunes intact.”
For the more recent period the best impression of income distribution can be got from a book by Simon Kuznets published only several months ago: Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1953). For the greater part of his professional career Simon Kuznets has been directing the National Bureau of Economic Research’s analysis of American national income, and his findings have been published in several scores of volumes. In this latest book he traces the percentage of the country’s income that went, respectively, to the top 1 per cent and the top 5 per cent. The top 1 per cent were, for example, a family of three with an income of more than $6,300 in 1933, or $12,600 in 1929, or $16,800 in 1946, while the minimum income of the top 5 per cent ranged from $1,250 in 1933 to $2,300 in 1946. During the period between the First World War and the end of the depression, the proportion of the total income that these upper groups received varied little from year to year, only to fall sharply in the most recent period:
Top 1% | Top 5% | |
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Average, 1919-1938 | 13% | 25% |
Average, 1947-1948 | 8.5% | 18% |
“The recent decline in upper group shares,” Kuznets writes, “which for its magnitude and persistence is unmatched in the record, obviously has various causes. The most prominent are the reduction of unemployment and the marked increase in total income flowing to lower income groups (particularly farmers and wage earners); shifts in the saving and investment habits of upper income groups which may have curtailed their chances of getting large receipts from successful venture capital and equity investments; lower interest rates; and steeper income taxes. . . .”
In summary, it can be said that social mobility, whether measured from one generation to the next or within the job careers of individuals, whether by occupation or income, is high. Its range, however, tends to be limited: that is, farmers may become workmen; workers may rise to a higher level of skill or become small businessmen or lower white-collar employees; lower employees may rise to executive positions; and professional positions tend to be filled from upper white-collar or business groups. Many of the shifts are temporary, and there is a smaller but nonetheless significant rate of downward mobility. These tendencies, finally, while definite enough to fix a pattern, also encompass many individual exceptions.
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What then is the basis for the notion, still generally held in learned as well as lay circles, that it is harder to get ahead than it was a generation ago?
Two scholarly myths have played an enormous role in maintaining this illusion. The first is that of “the closing of the American frontier.” A generation ago, Frederick Jackson Turner stated his famous thesis that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” A large number of his students, teaching American history in colleges throughout the country, have made of this assertion a dogma. As Frederic L. Paxson, a leading disciple, put it, “The frontier hypothesis presents the most attractive single explanation of the distinctive trends of American history.” Even if it were the most attractive single explanation, it would still have the faults of any monolithic theory, and no more than any other can it encompass in one narrow concept the complexity of American society. In an oft-quoted passage, the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 declared that the frontier “cannot any longer have a place in the census reports.” If this is what is meant by the closing of the frontier, it has not had a markedly adverse effect on the American economy, which has grown fastest since 1890. And if this is not what is meant, then the phrase becomes—what it does become in many discussions—hardly more than a metaphor, convenient because of its very vagueness.
Often the phrase “the closing of the frontier” has been a way of joining Turner’s monolithism to that of Marx. Certainly, this is not the occasion to discuss the adequacy of the Marxist theory of capitalist development; but the recurrent issue of “American exceptionalism,” as it is termed in Comintern jargon, would indicate that Marxism suffered its greatest reverse in the attempt made to apply it to America. Leading Russian theorists from Lenin to Voznesensky, American Communists from Jay Lovestone to Earl Browder, have not been sure that the breakdown of capitalism was proceeding according to schedule in the United States. A century after the Communist Manifesto was written many of its dire prophecies have been fulfilled—in Europe; but the center of world capitalism continues to grow in wealth and strength. In Communist terms, the United States is, indeed, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” The rate of social mobility slowed down appreciably during the great depression of the 1930’s, and a definitive evaluation of current trends would have to be based on some theory of economic development. But those who think some variant of Marxian theory will serve, and who consequently believe that another depression is just around the corner, seem to me to show a faith as touching—and unwarranted—as ex-President Hoover’s.
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If neither “the closing of the frontier” nor “the maturity of American capitalism” was relevant to social mobility, there were other structural changes in American society that were. In a stimulating article written in 1942,3 the sociologist Elbridge Sibley presented the hypothesis that social mobility in the past had depended on two fundamental population trends. Typically, the average family size in the upper classes had been small, creating a social vacuum that the more numerous sons of the lower classes rushed in to fill. More recently, this class difference in fertility has become smaller, for now the average family size of the upper classes has increased and that of the lower classes has decreased. Thus when professional or executive posts, say, are vacated by retirement or death, they can be filled by sons or nephews of the same social class. Secondly, the rapid upward mobility of the past had been in large part a consequence of immigration. Most of the million immigrants who came to this country yearly from 1900 to 1914 were peasants who spoke little or no English. Inevitably, they entered the American labor market at the bottom, and pushed native-born workers up at least one rung. But immigration is now restricted to a fraction of its pre-1914 numbers, and American society can no longer depend on this semi-automatic process to insure the continuance of its open-class structure. Moreover, Sibley might have added, some of the more recent immigrants, who came for political rather than economic reasons, have been urban professionals and other white-collar types who enter the labor market above its midpoint. Before 1914, in summary, both the differential fertility and the large immigration favored a high rate of upward mobility, but since then both of these underlying demographic trends have changed markedly.
Why, then, has the rate of mobility not fallen, contrary to Sibley’s expectations? Very tentatively, four reasons can be suggested to explain this:
- The development of the economy continues to favor upward mobility. Sibley noted that between 1870 and 1930 an estimated nine million workers had shifted from manual to white-collar work; but that since 1930 technical progress had resulted in technological unemployment. His assumption, however, that the depression set a permanent downward trend has not proved to be correct.4
- Since the immigration law was passed in the 1920’s, there seems to have been a compensatory increase in the immigration of unskilled laborers from the Western Hemisphere —French Canadians, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. While the total number has never approached the previous average of a million a year, it has been a significant factor for certain regions.
- Internal migration may serve some of the same functions as the former large overseas immigration. According to Census Bureau statistics, during the period 1934-39, 13.1 per cent of the population fourteen years and over moved from the county in which they were living; during the fiscal year 1940-1941, 20.8 per cent of the total population, including children, moved to another county; and for the fiscal year 1948-1949, this figure was about 6 per cent. True, these migrants do not typically take the lowest jobs as the pre-1914 immigrants used to do; the Oakland study, for example, showed a high correlation between geographical movement and upward mobility. But they do upset the social structure of the communities into which they move, as well as affecting that of the communities they leave.
- It may be that the continued movement of women into the labor force is a factor in promoting social mobility. While women take many of the white-collar jobs that become available, and thus absorb a portion of the social mobility implicit in the structural change of the economy, within any occupational group they are usually bunched at the bottom, thus possibly helping the men in that group to rise.
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However, it is not illusion or error alone that supports the idea that the rate of social mobility has declined. It does have a certain limited validity. Even today, with full employment, certain of the once typical paths up the social scale are much more difficult to climb. In particular, with the growing complexity of large industry, more and more firms have filled openings in the lower managerial ranks with graduates of engineering schools rather than by promoting skilled workers. But, while education has become the major barrier to upward social mobility, it has also become so widely distributed that it acts as a barrier through which more and more people can pass.
Over the past sixty years, the proportion of the population aged fourteen to seventeen years that was enrolled in secondary school has increased:
1890 | 7% |
1910 | 15% |
1930 | 51% |
1950 | 84% |
Thus, in half a century, the high school has changed from a preparatory school for a small elite to something almost as universally attended in this country as elementary school. Over the same period college enrollment has grown even faster, with college graduates increasing steadily from 9,371 in 1870 to 432,058 in 1950. At the present time, in proportion to the population of the two countries, there are as many college teachers in the United States as there are college students in Britain.
But the person who does not get on this educational bandwagon young is excluded from the highest positions pretty effectively: one may become a salesman or a small proprietor, as we have seen, but is not likely to go higher. And the chances of getting this valuable higher education are still much smaller for the children of workers or farmers than for the children of white-collar workers. A study in New York State showed that in 1940 whether high school graduates went on to college depended in part on their grades, but also on their fathers’ incomes. The proportion of the best students that entered college varied from 41 per cent for the lowest income group to almost double that for the highest income group.
Family Income | ||||
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Scholastic Standing |
Less than $2,500 |
$2,500 to $4,999 |
$5,000 to $8,999 |
$9,000 and over |
Highest | ||||
quarter | 41% | 41% | 60% | 76% |
Second | ||||
quarter | 19% | 26% | 27% | 56% |
Lower | ||||
half | 11% | 13% | 27% | 44% |
This table indicates two things: that a young person’s class has a definite influence on whether or not he attends college, but does not decide it. Fully four-tenths of those in the highest scholastic group and lowest income group went on to college in 1940, and only four-tenths of those in the lowest scholastic group and highest income group.
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Whenever a conclusion is based on isolated facts torn from their social context, we do well to suspect that the choice of these facts was not haphazard but in line with some prejudice or ideology. In this case, two ideologies that seem to have little in commonnostalgic Americanism and Marxism—have cooperated to create and maintain “enlightened” illusions about the American class structure.
The prime representative of the first school is the anthropologist William Lloyd Warner. He began with a survey in Newburyport, Massachusetts, reported at length in the “Yankee City” series of books, and he and his disciples have carried out dozens of similar surveys throughout the country. These studies can be criticized on several grounds, but only one of these is relevant here. Warner made a virtue of the fact that he started his study without a conscious theoretical framework—without “distorting preconceptions,” as the phrase goes. He went to Newburyport, looked around, and “discovered” class there; and the clear implication in all of the works of this school is that this is a new phenomenon to be viewed against the golden backdrop of America’s heroic classless past. For example, in a book about “Jonesville,” a small Midwestern town he has studied, he writes:
The workers’ ‘stairway to the stars’ in Jonesville and America is no longer an open highway. Climbing step by step to bigger and better jobs for most workers and their sons is a story of the past. . . . The Lincoln myth and the American dream of striving to win and getting to the top do not fit the mill worker. To start today in youth as a mill worker in the Jonesvilles of America is usually to end there in old age.”5 When present reality is contrasted with a stairway to the stars, an open highway, the Lincoln myth, the American Dream, is it any wonder that these analysts find it a bit grubby?
The vinegary review that C. Wright Mills wrote of one of Warner’s earlier books achieved a certain fame in sociological circles, if only because of its contrast with the usually staid language of the learned journals. And yet Mills’s own book, White Collar, is a perfect example of what might be called the Warner method of analysis. The drab picture he paints of the “lumpen bourgeoisie” is made up in equal parts of carefully selected statistics, flamboyant prose, and American Dream background music According to Mills’s analysis, the independent farmer, for example, continues to exist only by grace of government largess, and he contrasts this—not with the railroads that grew fat on public lands, nor with the manufacturers who pushed tariff bills through Congress, nor with 19th-century farmers who took their largess in the form of cheap or free land—but with some fanciful image of a free-enterpriser who disdained any proffer of federal assistance and haughtily refused to manipulate state legislatures. Or: the independent storekeeper is under pressure from the chains and must work hard and long hours; but the precise working conditions of the crackerbox philosopher who kept a general store in the country a generation ago are left vague. As social scientists of opposed schools, Warner and Mills have cooperated in proving in this matter that reality and ideology are not in accord. If there is a difference between them, it may be that Warner is naive and that Mills hopes that his readers are.
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As so often in social science, the difficulty in the case of social mobility is that we have no scale against which to measure our findings. Once we know that social mobility exists at a certain rate, how can we say whether it is “high” or “low” or whatever, unless we are able to say that it is “high” or “low” with respect to something else? As the Lipset-Bendix-Malm article puts it, “We are unable to interpret a finding according to which 75 per cent of the manual workers have always done manual labor, while 25 per cent have also had jobs in the non-manual occupations. Such evidence is evidence neither for rigidity (75%) nor for mobility (25%), since we lack the comparative data necessary to make such assertions meaningful.” Lacking such a scale, most analysts, either explicitly or by implication, have measured the social mobility they found against the absolute of “classless society,” as found either in the mythical American past or in the Utopian Marxian future. No concept in the study of society is so confused and abused as the “classless society.”
Taken literally, a “classless society” is a contradiction in terms. In all of the dozen variants of the definition of “society,” the main element is always a structured group; and one of the main planes of this structure is determined by the division of labor. What, then, is “classless society” in an industrialized country? Neither Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, Lenin’s State and Revolution, nor Bukhara’s Historical Materialism gives us, much enlightenment. Lenin tells us that the term means that “there is no difference between the members of society in their relation to the social means of production,” or, in other words, that “classless society” signifies no more than the abolition of private property. Bukharin writes that it is “a question that has been but little discussed in Marxian literature,” and he himself disposes of it in some three pages, which form the most detailed exposition of the idea that I know of in Marxist literature. Classes, he tells us, developed out of the division of labor, and from the differentiation resulting from technically necessary organizational functions. Why then will the abolition of private property lead to the disappearance of classes? Why is Robert Michels not correct when he says that socialists may be victorious, but not socialism?
“An example will show Michels’ error,” writes Bukharin. “When the bourgeoisie is in power, it is by reason of the power—as we know—not of all the members of the class, but of its leaders. Yet it is evident that this condition does not result in a class stratification within the bourgeoisie. The landlords in Russia ruled [through] their high officials. . . but this stratum did not set itself up as a class against the other landlords. The reason was that these other landlords did not have a lower standard of living than that of the former, furthermore, their cultural level was about the same, on the whole, and the rulers were constantly recruited from this class. . . .
“[During] the transition period from capitalism to socialism, i.e., the period of the proletarian dictatorship. . . there will inevitably result a tendency to ‘degeneration,’ i.e., the excretion of a leading stratum in the form of a class-germ. This tendency will be retarded by two opposing tendencies: first, by the growth of the productive forces; second, by the abolition of the educational monopoly. . . . The outcome of the struggle will depend on which tendencies turn out to be the stronger.”
Thus, a “classless society” apparently means not a society without classes but rather one in which the class differences in income and culture are “on the whole” not very great. It is a society in which education is not a class monopoly, so that positions in the ruling “stratum” become open to all persons of competence. Moreover, the development of the economy is a decisive factor, for only with the sharply increased production that full industrialization affords will general cultural democratization be possible. In short, once “classless society” in its Marxian sense becomes more concrete than a mere slogan, it proves to be not an absolute against which to measure social mobility but actually something very like present-day American society.
On analysis, the “classless society” of the mythical American past turns out to be one, simply, in which social mobility was high. Once we attempt to analyze the slogan of the “American Dream,” once we try to get behind the ‘“tradition”—as Robert Lynd put it in his Middletown in Transition— that any “enterprising man with an idea and a shoestring of capital” could start his own business, we find a society with a quite definite class structure. Social mobility in the United States during the 19th century was very high compared with that in Europe, but whether it was higher than in present-day America no one can really say. So much is true: since the whole economy was different, the routes to higher status were not the same, but probably no greater proportion of the population achieved such status, nor was it easier to achieve.
Without going into details, it is necessary furthermore to indicate the long-term shift in class power that has taken place. Property qualifications for voting, present in twelve of the original thirteen states and persisting until well into the 19th century, have disappeared. The abolition of slavery was followed, but only after the First World War, by a painfully slow but real improvement in the Negro’s status. Industrial laws replaced the common law under which employer-worker relations had been regulated by master-servant norms. The trade union movement grew to its present impressive size and strength and, perhaps even more important, its authority was made legitimate to the point where most middle-class persons recognize the right of the trade union movement to function as a class organization. The urban concentration of wealth has been counterbalanced by various “artificial” measures designed to raise the farmers’ standard of living. The income tax has become a permanent feature of American society.
No matter how we try to analyze the longterm trend in social mobility—whether we look at the distribution of occupations, income, education, wealth or power—the sparse data we do have would indicate that the class structure has become more fluid rather than rigid.
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In any society, the jobs to be done vary in degree of pleasantness, difficulty, and importance. To get the work done requires, first of all, a differentiation of authority; and jobs that are especially important and those requiring especially long training tend to be rewarded with a higher amount of material goods or by symbolic marks of prestige. In short, class differentiation serves a function. That is not to say, of course, that the class structure of any particular society serves its function perfectly, or even well. The point is rather that the class division in every society of which we have any knowledge exists not only because of the psychological differences among humans but because of the social function that class serves. In the abstract, one can conceive of other social institutions that might serve the same function —for example, a feeling of identity with the group intense enough to motivate all to work without supervision and to motivate some persons to do the less pleasant or more difficult work without special reward. On the basis of efficiency and other values, it is possible to choose (still in the abstract) between class division and some such alternative—bearing in mind, however, that the function class division serves is important and that there is no historical precedent for its complete replacement by other institutions.
Class structures may be compared by ranging them along a continuum from the caste society, in which the family a person is born into completely determines his life’s chances, to the open-class society, in which birth has no effect on the individual’s class and status. Neither of these ideal types has ever existed in pure form. In particular, so long as the family as we know it persists, each person’s attitudes and aptitudes will continue to be formed in large part by his parents. Thus, it is completely logical that strongly egalitarian societies, such as the Soviet Union immediately after 1917, or Israeli kibbutzim, have tended to replace the family by public crèches. Such societies have also reacted against the social division of labor, the second principal determinant of class position. Sometimes, as in the various Utopian communities of 19th-century America or, again, in the kibbutzim, the group has concentrated on agriculture and left it to the profane world outside to provide industrial products. Sometimes, though more in theory than in practice, the circulation of the entire labor force among the various occupations has been proclaimed. Thus, Lenin declared that “every cook” should become an administrator; and in the society that Edward Bellamy described in Looking Backward all young men and women were drafted for a period into a civilian service corps to which such menial tasks as waiting on tables were assigned.
Those who have advocated scrapping fundamental institutions have seldom indicated that their programs were based on a choice between competing values. The influence of the family is not wholly bad, by any criterion. And in our complex society a professional, for example, is likely to be thirty years old before he finishes his special schooling, his apprenticeship as interne or law clerk, and his starting practice. From the point of view of social efficiency, it is disadvantageous to force such a man to postpone his productive life, as such writers as Bellamy suggest, for, say, another two years, or to shift him to a different occupation once he has learned his own.
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A very high rate of social mobility may have harmful consequences, of which we can conveniently distinguish three kinds.
First, even in a rapidly growing economy, a high rate of upward mobility entails some downward mobility; and the consequent nouveaux pauvres are a liability in any social system. Typically, declassed people will seek to retain their status by irrational means: it is they who foster race hatred, who give demagogues their first support, who form the vanguard of totalitarian parties. So long as their number is relatively small they constitute a nuisance that can be controlled; but any social program that leads to an appreciable increase in declassed “lumpen” ought to include measures to reabsorb them into the social fabric as quickly as possible.
Secondly, a class system that fosters a very wide diffusion of cultural values may well sacrifice some of these values. While a very much higher percentage of young people attend college in the United States than in Britain—as we have noted in our discussion of education—the level of education at American colleges is, on the whole, decidedly lower. Just recently, for example, Dr. Minard Stout, president of the University of Nevada, has advocated that it admit any graduate of a Nevada high school, regardless of his academic rating or the kind of courses he had taken in high school. Opening the doors that wide is a first step toward closing them altogether.
Thirdly, rapid social mobility often results in personal maladjustment, if not actual neurosis. This is true both for those who try to climb up the social scale and fail, and for those who succeed. Middle-class Americans are not nearly as happy as their fantastically high standard of living would seem to warrant, for their aspirations are always higher. Instead of enjoying their ample possessions, they strive for higher positions, or gather more gadgets, as new symbols of higher status. The pattern is both to own more and to belittle what one has as hardly comparable with what one will have.
The disparity between boundless aspirations and the opportunities to fulfill them undoubtedly does much to create the restlessness typical of American civilization. In a more rigidly stratified society people get a sense of security from “knowing their place,” but Americans have no place that endures from one generation to another, or even from year to year. They push upward, and if one avenue fails them they seek another. The result is a very active economy, full of ingenious new ideas and products and services such as were never dreamt of in any other society. On the other hand, criminologists agree that a fundamental cause of juvenile delinquency and crime is that the equal opportunities that slum children learn to expect as their right are not really given them. If this theory is correct, then the “cause” of the relatively high crime rate may not be so much the American slums, which are not worse on the whole than those in other countries, but the promissory note in the American democratic credo, inevitably unpayable to so many.
And there is also a price to be paid by the successful. Even if a person is able to climb the social ladder so fast that he catches up with his aspirations, this does not mean that in general he is content. For changing one’s class means changing one’s way of life. The son of a worker who becomes a lawyer has only begun the move that the shift in occupation implies. To complete it, he must forsake one set of friends and find another, forget pinochle and bowling and learn bridge and skiing, leave the Baptists and join the Episcopalians, and so on. He is of course gratified by his success, but he may feel too anxious to be very happy. He may become a prime example of that modern species, the marginal man, on the edge of several groups without belonging to any. The standards that he learned as a child are not those he is trying to learn now, and he may suffer from what sociologists term anomie— literally, normlessness; more generally, an inability to choose amid the confusion of conflicting standards. Anomie, a sense of not belonging, is typical of highly mobile societies; for in rigidly structured societies, by definition, a man knows where his place is and what behavior is expected of him.
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The confusions frequently to be found in discussions of the American class system derive in part from the fact that they are conducted against the background of an egregious paradox: the United States, that arch representative of world capitalism, is becoming a socialist society, insofar as that term has any concrete meaning.
The American economy is no longer predominantly a laissez-faire one. Competitive production has been supplanted in crucial areas by controlled and subsidized production, especially for military uses. The increasing role of war production has speeded up long-range structural changes, and has markedly increased the role of government in the whole economy. The new principle is to grant, through government action, profits to those socially desirable enterprises that cannot obtain them in the open market—for example, defense items and agriculture. On the other hand, some of the idyllic virtues of the laissez-faire system have been retained, for it is still remarkably easy to set up a small business. The mortality rate among such small enterprises is indeed high, as Mills, and Lipset and Bendix, and others point out, but is it higher than it used to he? And, more important, is it higher than it ought to be? It is precisely the virtue of such a fluid system that it provides for a good deal of trial-and-error experiment, and to complain that a man starting his business has no guarantee of success is to demand the best of all possible worlds.
The American economy is mixed, but American culture is, in effect, socialist. It is based on the same essential factors—the enormous industrial production, the high and widely distributed income, the general distribution of equalitarian cultural values—that any socialist culture would rest on. The very high proportion of low-grade cultural products is related to the large number of people with purchasing power but without tradition—that is, to the fact that the society is highly mobile. That this lowgrade culture is distributed commercially is true, but not as important as many have made it. The American economy can meet any reasonable demand, and in other types of consumers products, where the demand has been for quality goods, the quality of production has been high.
The social structure, finally, is what Bukharin called a “classless society.” Not indeed what orthodox Marxists look for in the ultimate phase of “communism” but what they expect during the transitional period of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Differences in the income and culture of the entire population of the United States are great, but these differences tend to be less “on the whole” than in any advanced society we know of. Moreover, the two forces that will prevent, in Bukharin’s terms, the United States from degenerating into a class society—“the growth of the productive forces” and “the abolition of the education monopoly”—are very much in evidence. But the clearest criterion is the rate of social mobility— the fact that the highest “stratum” is regularly recruited from the rest of the society.
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1 In almost all the studies that we mention, social mobility is defined in terms of the movement from one occupational group to another. Of course, the kind of work a man does is not the only factor determining his social class; his income, his prestige, and his authority are also very important. But social scientists agree that occupation is the best index of class, for two reasons. It is very much more definite than other indices: a man is much more likely to be able to tell us, for example, that his father was a carpenter than what his father’s status and standard of life were. Secondly, while all the factors that define a man’s station in life interact, in most cases his occupation is the most important one; the work he does is more likely to affect his income or status than vice versa.
But it is well to be aware of some of the shortcomings of the occupational index. First of all, a good deal of mobility is possible within a single occupation, as when a physician rises from interne to small-town doctor to metropolitan specialist, or a businessman who begins with a single establishment develops it into a chain. Secondly, occupational groups are usually rather heterogeneous: “own business” ranges from push-cart peddlers to partnerships large enough to compete with major corporations; “farm” from migrant pickers to ranch-owners; and similarly for other groups.
2 “Social Mobility and Occupational Career Patterns: I. Stability of Jobholding” and “II. Social Mobility,” in the American Journal of Sociology, Volume 57 (January 1952 and March 1952 respectively).
3 Elbridge Sibley, “Some Demographic Clues to Stratification,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 7, June 1942.
4 Indeed, from 1910 to 1953 the proportion of the labor force employed in white-collar occupations has almost doubled, increasing from 21 per cent in 1910 to 39 per cent in 1953, and the rate of increase has been highest in the last decade. The increase, moreover, was approximately the same in each of the occupational groups within the white-collar class, professional and executive as well as clerical. And within the working class, the major trend has been a marked decrease in the proportion of unskilled, from 15 per cent in 1910 to 6 per cent in 1953 (though this may be the consequence partly of changes in census classification). Farmers and farm workers have fallen from more than half of those occupied in 1870 to less than a tenth today.
5 W. Lloyd Warner et al, Democracy in Jonesville: A Study in Quality and Inequality (Harper, 1949).