Re: [Leica] Leica Class double date

[Chandos Michael Brown <cmbrow@mail.wm.edu>]

One hesitates to take issue with the distinguished historian, but I've 
never seen "yeomanry" (which has a technical meaning) used to describe what 
most American historians would characterize as the "middle class"--or, in 
the language of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, "the middling 
sort."  Likewise "gentry," which passed into American English as a term of 
opprobrium (often used ironically to describe the affectations of the 
would-be 'aristocracy') by the third decade of the 19th century (with the 
notable exception of the lower South).  In any event, in nearly every 
application, English or American, "gentry" applies to landowners, not 
merchants (distinguished by the end of the 18th c.--as in Adam Smith) as 
the "mercantile classes."

Class in America is a vexing problem for those who would wish to describe 
both its current meaning and its historical development.  The labels below 
do nothing to clarify the issues.

One most also observe that social mobility works in both directions in the 
US--as elsewhere--think of the character of Hurstwood, so movingly 
described in Dreiser's -Sister Carrie- (1901) or in endless other examples.

Chandos


>pariahs (street people)
>underclass (welfare types)
>working class
>yeomanry (shop-keepers, admin sorts, the guys who wear short-sleeve shirts)
>gentry (large shop owners, managers in major concerns, professionals)
>upper-crust (the rich)
>
>In the US, there is social mobility.  The children of yeoman families,
>especially, are moving up into the gentry.  They are joining country-clubs,
>going to tailored clothing, and driving imported cars, things their folks
>never would have done.  And the children of working-class stiffs are going
>to college and getting themselves jobs as management trainees in banks, and
>are moving from Chevies and Fords to Buicks and Mercuries.
>
>It is subtle, but it is there.
>
>Marc
>
>msmall@roanoke.infi.net  FAX:  +540/343-7315
>Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!



Chandos Michael Brown
Assoc. Prof., History and American Studies
College of William and Mary

http://www.wm.edu/CAS/ASP/faculty/brown