The Challenge to the Middle Class

I

IN no other land is the middle class so solidly fortified as it is in America. The constitutional prohibition against titles of nobility has done something, but not everything, and perhaps not much to strengthen the foundations of the middle-class fortification. Probably even with lords and ladies and barons and earls in this country, the rich soil, the inestimable wealth beneath the soil, the illimitable forests, the Yankee inventiveness of the race that inhabits the continent, and its isolation between the two great oceans of the globe, would have produced wealth which in modern times is the mark of social distinction, wealth so fabulous that it had to be distributed with something like equity in a middle class.

We had a new kind of human adventure on this continent. In settling the fertile land, opening the mines, and inventing methods of producing wealth from the raw materials so bountifully bestowed upon the continent, we have had two distinct advantages denied to our ancestors in Asia and in Europe. We were free from foreign wars and fears of war for a century and a half. We had the benefit of steam and its machinery in hastening the conquest of the land. Thus we developed a middle class in the United States which has seemed socially, economically, and politically impregnable. Moreover, ladders, runways, ramps, and escalators have been moving during the five generations, going up and going down from the proletariat to the plutocracy and back, but always stopping for a generation or so in the middle class. While we have had the three classes, they were not hereditary. Only a few old families survive in the plutocracy. Only a few Jukes and morons persist in the proletariat. But both plutocrat and proletariat, passing up and down, have found a salving sense of security. A middle-class complacency has been the ideal American life.

But the swift subsidence of wealth after October 1929 reacted like an earthquake shock upon the American bourgeoisie. The appearance of the unemployed not merely in millions, but in tens of millions, produced a caste with broken morale. That gave the American burghers something to think about.

For the first time in American history, labor is becoming class-conscious in a considerable area. The craft union, which grew so sturdily under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, in its philosophy was essentially not classconscious. Its ideals were socially reactionary from the Marxian standpoint. The appearance of the class-conscious I. W. W. just before the outbreak of the World War, and its flashes of activity during the war, were negligible in the total of labor disturbances and outbreaks in the second and third decades of the century. But the appearance of the vertical union, Mr. Lewis’s CIO, is a new thing, a labor organization with a class-conscious background.

Moreover, the labor vote in the election of 1936 for the first time was cast solidly for a President and a Congress. Labor claimed naturally to have captured Washington. Not the kind of labor that hopes to rise from the craft union to a foremanship and from a foremanship to a superintendency and from a superintendency to a place in the front office. The labor solidarity that helped to win the election of 1936 for Mr. Roosevelt, the labor which contributed nearly half a million dollars to the Democratic campaign, is not bringing its hat in its hand and pulling a forelock when it enters the front office of the factory. It is not looking around to spot the chair it soon will warm. The labor that was one of the six powerful and more or less antagonistic minorities which produced the Democratic vote in 1936 was for the moment classconscious to the core so far as leadership is concerned. It has revived the public-be-damned attitude of the elder Vanderbilt. The middle class has been able to tolerate the public-be-damned attitude from its plutocrats who were merely spoiled children. But the middle class is batting surprised and even troubled eyes when it is damned nonchalantly by the proletariat.

II

Now if other evidences were needed to convince thoughtful Americans in the middle class that they are in some jeopardy, they should be warned by the appearance in the last twenty years of a distinctly proletarian literature in their country, the first appearance of that phenomenon. Fifty years ago James L. Ford wrote a skit in which he represented Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of the Century Magazine in the heyday of its glossy-collared, black-tied, derby-hatted, frock-coated respectability. Mr. Gilder in Ford’s sketch was standing on Fourteenth Street looking south across the literary trocha (a word which meant barbwire entanglement) and was pondering upon the vast treasure house of unused literary material in the slums below Fourteenth Street. To his amazement and alarm he was hailed by a denizen across the entanglement who pointed out the need in our literature of just that wealth of literary riches in the life south of the trocha. Mr. Gilder is represented by Ford as losing his poise. In the language of his literary interlocutor, ‘he trim up bote hands!’

Mr. Gilder has passed, and American magazines and publishers of his class have put down their hands. They have opened their doors to the proletarian writers below Fourteenth Street and all across the land. Moreover, their writers do not confine their outgivings to fiction. They have produced a distinct American proletarian philosophy, — an American proletarian dialectic, if you will, — a premise which assumes that the old American scheme of things, and particularly the middle-class scheme of things, its ideas, its economy, its philosophy, are basically false and must be not merely changed, not just converted into something better and more equitable, but utterly wiped out. If Mr. Gilder in his bowler hat, his Ascot tie and wing collar, spats, cane, and drooping moustache, could read the proletarian literature of to-day, he would put down his hands and turn up his toes. It would paralyze him with its violence.

This year three significant books have been written as though to order, setting forth with clarity, courage, and with more than passing tolerance for the middle-class point of view, the social, economic, and political implications of the struggle in American life which amounts, for the moment, to a challenge to the middle class. These books, by some pleasant coincidence, present three different points of view, three approaches to what must be inevitably the changing status of the American middle class. It must change, if something more devastating does not happen to it.

In Middletown in Transition, by Robert and Helen Lynd, we find the average Midwestern American industrial country town. Here for a hundred years the middle class has ruled. It has taken economic leadership because it has had access to capital. It has bought and owned the tools of trade. It has maintained its political rule by dividing its adversaries in the working class. This has not been consciously done. The establishment of the American two-party system has made a natural political division. Somewhat this division also cuts through the middle class. But until 1932 the political division of the middle class has represented no more class-consciousness than that of the workers. In 1932 the middle class began to shift into the Republican Party, the workers into the Democratic Party, and at the same time the Negro, who had been traditionally Republican, left the party which was proud to boast that it had struck the shackles off four million slaves.

Socially, the middle class has dominated Middletown because the middle class was the largest supporter of social institutions — the church, the college, the welfare organizations, the Chamber of Commerce, and the various community benevolences, ‘drives,’ and organized endeavors which attract community support. Since the depression, this dominance of the middle class has not seriously been shaken in the American country town — meaning by ’country town’ any community between five thousand and a hundred thousand where people are fairly well settled, where a considerable minority of the inhabitants has lived for two generations and an elite minority has lived for three. The older families form the bulwarks of business and politics, and man the social breastworks. The middle class in this typical country town lives on an income between two thousand and twenty thousand dollars a year. The holder of any income higher than that, whether earned or inherited, begins to put on airs of plutocracy and is of less consequence by reason of his pride.

The authors of Middletown in Transition have made an authentic picture of their subject. Studying the features of the portrait, we see but slight modification from the lineaments of the old American type. Its virtues are thrift, diligence, reasonable honesty, as much tolerance as the times will permit, much more knowledge than understanding, and a keen eye for the main chance — the Puritan virtues. The middle class in this community elects the sheriff, controls the police, has access to the governor, who is the head of the state militia; and in any contest with any foe, social, economic, or political, the middle class will have the tremendous advantage of the first call upon the forces of law and order. So the middle class stands for law and order as the first thing to be desired in any moment of crisis or calamity.

This typical Midwestern industrial town, which is certainly the fortress of the ruling classes, is strong enough to dominate every state between the Alleghenies and the Pacific Coast. Not more than a dozen cities in that area are large enough to produce the urban type of civilization in which the middle class is not in control of the police, in which the middle class has no idea who is sheriff and must approach the governor politely through the city boss, who might easily turn radical if votes were on the radical side. Then he might easily be convinced he might profitably betray the money side of any social, political, or economic disturbance.

III

It is urban America which has called forth American City: A Rank-and-File History, by Charles Rumford Walker. The American social, economic, and political scene changes quickly from the country town to the city, and a town becomes a city in America when it has attained somewhere between two and three hundred thousand population. In the city the boss rules. The boss is generally supplied with money by seekers of special privilege in the city who live in the beautiful suburbs, who control the banks, the public utilities, the industries of the place and of the region, and who form a small classconscious group which might as well be frankly called the American plutocracy. It is not a hereditary class, but it nevertheless is a distinct group. It rules. Its money oils the political machine of the local city bosses. The political machine protects crime as far as it dares, looks after the poor in trouble, whether with the police or with the new Federal agencies that distribute work and food. This machine gives just enough to the middle class in the way of public improvements, boulevards, parks, health service, schools, traffic rules, residential zoning ordinances, pure and abundant water, reasonably low utility rates, and a plug-hat façade of respectability in the outer walls of the city hall, to keep the middle class in bounds. Speaking rather broadly, the governing classes in the American city buy the middle class with the largesse of their own taxes and fool the proletariat with benevolences — throwing in a demagogue occasionally when needed to quiet the workers’ unrest.

The story of this particular American city which Mr. Walker tells is the story of the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. The time of the story is from 1933 to 1936. The social locale of the story is the working class in a series of major strikes. The point of the story is that the workers in our cities are beginning to be class-conscious. America is developing a proletariat. That word produces blood pressure in the upper and middle classes. American classconsciousness as developed in our larger cities is not necessarily, not even generally, communistic. It is not inevitably permanent. It is mildly socialistic, but not much more socialistic than either of the two Roosevelts and most of the progressive leaders of the last three decades, from La Follette and the first Roosevelt down to George Norris and Maury Maverick.

The interesting thing about the new alignment in American cities is that sometimes the city government reveals the divided loyalty of the political boss. In the past five years the boss frequently has been amenable to the workers. Always the boss has to take baksheesh from the plutocracy. Occasionally he has had to make embarrassing concessions to the proletariat in times of riot and disorder. So the poor fellow is accused of biting the hand that feeds him. But his choice is between the voters who carry the election for him, sometimes by crooked methods, and those who furnish the lubrication for his machine. In American City we see this conflict of interest between the political rulers of the city and those who once were its secret masters and still, in ordinary times, hold silent title to its governors. The story Mr. Walker tells so well is not a pleasant story, but Americans should know it. It will become more and more a typical story. The rise of the city in American life injects a new x into the equation of our civilization. In that x is certainly a challenge to the middle class.

Combined with national politics and the control of city government, that x in time will produce in the equation a new living standard for labor. American labor seems to be coming into a new zone of self-respect. As a means to this self-respect, the organization of labor by industries rather than by crafts is doing something more than boosting the wages of the man at the bottom of the economic scale, the unskilled laborer. It is giving him a sense of solidarity with his fellow workers and with industry. He is stalking unabashed into the middle class. We who have been in the middle class on this continent for three hundred years will have to move over and make room. What the admission of another group will mean, no one knows. Probably not much in the way of denial to the present incumbents. There will be plenty to go around. The net of it will probably be a minimum standard of living, below which, by reason of old-age pensions, health insurance, minimum wages, the abolition of child labor, housing operated as a public utility, and various similar economic gadgets, no one who is willing and able to work will be permitted to fall. From this standard, if America remains democratic, — and there is no serious sign that America is deserting permanently the democracy of the Constitution, — any man will be allowed to rise and go up as far as his talents will take him, provided only that he gives genuine economic return for the rewards he takes.

IV

Which brings us to the third book in this series, Gilbert Seldes’s Mainland. Mr. Seldes looks squarely at all that the Lynds see in Middletown and he does not flinch from what Mr. Walker reveals in his American City. But Mr. Seldes remembers and writes about something more than the industrial small town and the great urban metropolis. He adds to these the other four ninths — the farmer, the villager, the suburbanite. These additions complete the picture of America. Three more comprehensive studies of American life could not be assembled in one season if one editor had waved his wand and published them in one volume.

Mr. Seldes sees America not as an evolutionary offshoot of Europe but as a sport in the social development of humanity. He sees us creating by the evolutionary process a new way of life

— not merely higher standards of living for the masses, not merely universal education and free colleges and universities for the children of the worker as well as for those of the well-to-do. He sees us as a free people with freedom itself composing a considerable part of the actual difference in material things, with freedom and its material consequences affecting in turn the spiritual outlook of our people. He sees us as something new and strange on this planet, not merely as city dwellers in big and little towns, not as villagers or farmers, but as one people, moving incessantly up and down the economic scale with the generations, without static classes. He looks forward to an America that, for all our imperfections,

— they are many and obvious, and he does not blink them, — shall still hold to the ancient ways. This America shall keep on living by Puritan first principles which, though modified by the exigencies of expanding civilization, were in the hearts of the men who first broke into this wilderness and later crossed the prairie and climbed the mountains and settled on the Western coast.

Mr. Seldes feels that three things are permanent in the American heart which neither the city man, the town dweller, the farmer, nor the suburbanite will ever give up: ‘National independence, civil freedom, and private prosperity.’ He feels that they are bound together, that they do not conflict, and are combined against all the powers which would attack any one of them.

V

Here are these three beautiful and useful books. Each of them is a sincere piece of work, done with scholarly patience and real intelligence. Taken together, they tell the American story of to-day. If there be prophecy, these books are prophetic of the America of to-morrow. They make it clear that the middle class is under a genuine challenge. If what these three authors say is true, a new status of our social organization is on the horizon for the next decade. Certainly it is due before the present century closes. It is easy to say there will be changes, but no one can say what changes will come.

The thing that is happening is that Americans are trying in their own way to socialize the machines man has made and is making. The Marxians let loose a dynamic idea in the world a hundred years ago when they declared that if everyone were at work there would be enough to supply everyone with everything. But the Marxian mistake was in assuming that men would click into proper jobs. They ignored in their scheme of things the social and industrial truth — that without paying a heavy price for superintendence everyone would not go to work making anything, and there would not be enough for all. The place of organizing brains in the distributive system and the reward for those brains set the problem for America in this century.

Already the worker at the machine is in revolt at its tyranny. He will not be mechanized spiritually or socially. The whole turmoil and clamor of industry to-day is the worker’s cry against the rigid regime of the machine. It would channel the worker’s hours, rivet his spirit, and put his life on an assembly belt. He is demanding the individualism guaranteed to the middle class by our economic establishment — middle-class freedom, middleclass diversity of life, its right to culture, its access to beauty. The first thing the American industrial worker, and incidentally the American farmer, have to do is to convince their middleclass neighbors of the justice of their complaint and the fairness of their claims. When this case of the worker is established in the hearts of the middle classes, their ancient sense of right and fairness, their habit of righteousness and judgment, will make force unnecessary.

Public opinion may be depended upon to make just and even generous room for the workers. Mr. Seldes seems to feel that public opinion rises from the unexplorable spiritual forces that lie in the heart of American life. In the end they direct the course of our American civilization. These spiritual forces, which urge the glacially slow pace we keep in coming to our national verdicts and judgments in times of change and crisis, will control the decision in the struggle now pending between our plutocracy and our proletariat. Mr. Seldes clearly has faith that the righteousness that has exalted our nation for a century and a half will control the middleclass heart of America and give it power and wisdom to do full justice to the workers. As for the plutocracy, the problems it presents may easily be solved. We must not forget that our history shows this bitter irony in its commercial success: while the rich are growing richer, their brains are growing poorer.