My researches have persuaded me that there are nine classes in this country, as follows:
Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper middle
Middle
High proletarian
Mid-proletarian
Low proletarian
Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight
One thing to get clear at the outset is this: it’s not riches alone that define these classes. . . . “Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor,” says George Orwell, “but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but – this is the essential point – generally persist from birth to death. . . . It is . . . very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.” When John Fitzgerald Kennedy, watching Richard Nixon on television, turned to his friends and, horror-struck, said, “The guy has no class,” he was not talking about money.
Not that the three classes at the top don’t have money. The point is that money alone doesn’t define them, for the way they have their money is largely what matters. . . . The main thing distinguishing the top three classes from each other is the amount of money inherited in relation to the amount currently earned. The top-out-of-sight class (Rockefellers, Pres, DuPonts, Mellons, Fords, Vanderbilts) lives on inherited capital entirely. . . .
“When I think of a really rich man,” says a Boston blue-collar, “I think of one of those estates where you can’t see the house from the road.” Hence the name of the top class, which could just as well be called “the class in hiding.” Their houses are never seen from the street or road. They like to hide away deep in the hills or way off on Greek or Caribbean islands (which they tend to own), safe, for the moment, from envy and its ultimate attendants, confiscatory taxation and finally expropriation. . . .
The next class down, the upper class, differs from the top-out-of-sight class in two main ways. First, although it inherits a lot of its money, it earns quite a bit too, usually from some attractive, if slight, work, without which it would feel bored and even ashamed. It’s likely to make its money by controlling banks and the more historic corporations, think tanks, and foundations, and to busy itself with things like the older universities, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development, and the like, together with the executive branch of the federal government, and often the Senate. . . . And secondly, unlike the top-out-of-sights, the upper class is visible, often ostentatiously so. . . . When you pass a house with a would-be impressive facade visible from the street or highway, you know it’s occupied by a member of the upper class. . . .
We now come to the upper-middle class. It may possess virtually as much as the two classes above it. The difference is that it has earned most of it, in law, medicine, oil, shipping, real estate, or even the more honorific kinds of trade, like buying and selling works of art. Although they may enjoy some inherited money and use inherited “things” (silver, Oriental rugs), the upper-middles suffer from a bourgeois sense of shame, a conviction that to live on the earnings of others, even forebears, is not nice.
Caste marks of the upper-middles would include living in a house with more rooms than you need, except perhaps when a lot of “overnight guests” are present to help you imitate upper-class style. . . . This class is also the most “role-reversed” of all: men think nothing of cooking and doing housework, women of working out of the house in journalism, theater, or real estate. (If the wife stays home all the time, the family’s middle-class only.) Upper-middles like to show off their costly educations by naming their cats Spinoza, Clytemnestra, and Candide, which means, as you’ll have inferred already, that it’s in large part the class depicted by Lisa Birnbach and others’ Official Preppy Handbook, that significantly popular artifact of 1980.
. . . The middle class is distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income. I have known some very rich people who remain stubbornly middle-class, which is to say they remain terrified at what others think of them, and to avoid criticism are obsessed with doing everything right. . . .
“Status panic”: that’s the affliction of the middle class, according to C. Wright Mills, author of White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Hence the middles’ need to accumulate credit cards and take in The New Yorker, which it imagines registers upper-middle taste. . . .
If the audience for that sort of thing used to seem the most deeply rooted in time and place, today it seems the class that’s the most rootless. Members of the middle class are not only the sort of people who buy their own heirlooms, silver, etc. They’re also the people who do most of the moving long-distance (generally to very unstylish places), commanded every few years to pull up stakes by the corporations they’re in bondage to. They are the geologist employed by the oil company, the computer programmer, the aeronautical engineer, the salesman assigned to a new territory, and the “marketing” (formerly sales) manager deputed to keep an eye on him. . . . IBM and DuPont hire these people from second-rate colleges and teach them that they are nothing if not members of the team. Virtually no latitude is permitted to individuality or the milder forms of eccentricity, and these employees soon learn to avoid all ideological statements. . . . Terrified of losing their jobs, these people grow passive, their humanity diminished as they perceive themselves mere parts of an infinitely larger structure. Interchangeable parts, too. “The training makes our men interchangeable,” an IBM executive was once heard to say.
. . . Oddity, introversion, and love of privacy are the big enemies, a total reversal of the values of the secure upper orders. Among the middles there’s a convention that erecting a fence or even a tall hedge is an affront. And there’s also a convention that you may drop in on neighbors and friends without a telephone inquiry first. . . .
. . . Proceeding downward, we would normally expect to meet next the lower-middle class. But it doesn’t exist as such any longer, having been pauperized by the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into the high-proletarian class. What’s the difference? A further lack of freedom and self-respect. Our former lower-middle class, the new high proles, now head “the masses,” and even if they are positioned at the top of the proletarian classes, still they are identifiable as people things are done to. They are in bondage – to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast food, consumer schlock. Back in the 1940s there was still a real lower-middle class in this country, whose solid high-school education and addiction to “saving” and “planning” maintained it in a position – often precarious, to be sure – above the working class. . . . These former low-white-collar people are now simply working machines, and the wife usually works as well as the husband.
