The Divisions in American Society

Abstract

The contemporary American journalist and authority on social etiquette “Miss Manners,” once observed that “there are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.”1 It is a claim that captures well the long-held notion that America, while not exactly a classless society, is one in which class divisions are small and of limited importance. For over a century many observers have seen the most obvious difference between European societies and the United States as being the more limited role that social class seemed to have played in America.2 Not all European countries in the twentieth century experienced major class-centered political conflicts—Ireland did not, for example—but most did. At one extreme there was Britain where, after the First World War, there was no other line of social cleavage except for class.3 However, even in countries such as France, which had additional lines along which society was divided, class usually played a prominent role.4 Americans too tended to concur with Europeans in viewing their society as distinctive; its different origins—as a society of immigrants who had escaped from the postfeudal social relations of early-modern Europe—meant that class could not divide Americans in the way that it did Europeans. The greater social equality evident in postrevolutionary America was said to preclude the formation of classes during the era of industrialization.