MOBILITY, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC
In a speech to the U.S. Senate on February 2, 1832, Henry Clay stated that almost all the successful property owners of his acquaintance were "self-made men, who have whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor." Clay's fellow politicians, newspaper editors, lecturers, and men of great wealth ceaselessly reminded the nation that riches in America were won not by the well-born but by the hard-working. The New York merchant William E. Dodge made the precise claim that 75 percent of "our citizens of wealth" had risen from humble beginnings to their "present position." In Democracy in America, perhaps the most influential study of American society ever written, the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville reported that in the United States "most of the rich men" had earlier in their lives known the "sting of want." Nor were such observations confined to the pre-Civil War decades.
The belief that anyone, of whatever origins, can attain worldly success in the United States, the "land of opportunity," is a central ingredient of what has been called the American Dream. But it was only after 1927, when the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin published his treatise Social Mobility, that scholars began to use that term to describe the "vertical movement" of individuals and groups from one social or economic level or class to another—whether above their starting point, as in upward mobility, or below, as in downward mobility.
Well before the American Revolution, the eminent New Yorker Cadwallader Colden wrote an English friend that "the most opulent families in our memory have arisen from the lowest rank of the people." At the end of the nineteenth century, millions of readers were regaled by the more than one hundred novels by Horatio Alger, all of them sounding variations on the theme that by hard work, honesty, and perseverance, abetted by a little luck, poor boys could attain great wealth in the United States. And the "Horatio Alger myth" persisted into the twentieth century.
These cheerful notions rested on evidence that some people had indeed risen from obscure and humble beginnings to great fame and fortune. Their numbers, however, were not legion. Historians and sociologists in the past quarter century have unearthed masses of data on American social mobility patterns over the past three centuries. Their evidence makes possible a historical overview of American social and economic mobility patterns that rests on something more solid than the random examples that in the past were construed as typical, apparently for no better reason than that they were upbeat and consoling to the national ego.
Before assessing the verdict offered by this evidence, a word of caution: for all its volume, it lights up only a small corner of the darkness. Many communities, individuals, groups, and lines of work remain unexamined. To begin with, scholars disagree as to what constitutes social or economic position and how to measure vertical mobility. Moreover, their judgments are not always persuasive. One historian counts as "successful" persons who after ten years have become richer, and as "unsuccessful" those who have grown poorer. By this standard, the pauper who amassed ten dollars over the decade is a success, and the millionaire who lost the same amount is a failure. Yet whatever their deficiencies, the recent studies of vertical mobility are invaluable. They have provided greater evidence than ever before on the early circumstances not simply of small numbers but of many thousands of successful individuals. More important, they go beyond accounts of rags to riches, which, for all their fascination, describe relatively few people, to investigations of the fates and career paths followed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people over the course of their lives. A clearer light is thrown on the kind of opportunity a society provides by the extent to which masses of people experience modest but significant improvement in their circumstances than by the dramatic leap a few make from the bottom to the top of the social ladder.
Complexity best describes vertical mobility patterns in colonial America. In Maryland, for example, George Calvert offered vast land grants and the equivalent of aristocratic rank to those he anointed his ruling elite. These for the most part were men who in England had been regarded as of the "middling sort" and, if gentlemen, only gentlemen of the "fringe variety." Such men enjoyed what one scholar calls "shipboard mobility," moving a notch higher in the social scale merely by accepting Calvert's offer. Complicating the situation was the fact that high status in the colonies did not have quite the repute it had in the mother country. The poor men who came to Maryland as indentured servants in the first half of the seventeenth century thrived on attaining their personal freedom (after five to seven years of servitude), most of them becoming landowners and active in the affairs of their community. But the servants who came to Maryland in the latter half of the century fared poorly in freedom, victimized by the depression that overtook tobacco farming. In neighboring Virginia at the time, more than 40 percent of the members of the House of Burgesses had previously been servants. But Massachusetts, a land of small farms and hard work, offered few inducements to would-be aristocrats. In Salem, the socially emerging elite of the seventeenth century had considerable wealth to start with. For New England as a whole, those who achieved prominence had for the most part been successful in old England. Master craftsmen who came to America flourished; servants and journeymen "remained humble." A detailed investigation of the town of Dedham, Massachusetts, has revealed that during the seventeenth century "the average young man had little chance of growing rich." A century later his son's chances remained "bleak." Of course, this does not necessarily mean that "average young men" did not improve their lot at all.
In the eighteenth century the picture remained mixed. Opportunity to rise varied from place to place. Older, settled areas offered little chance of success to those of limited means. Opportunity in all geographical areas was greater in frontier counties than in developed eastern regions. One scholar is much impressed by the large proportion of young Bostonians who became taxpayers in the 1770s and 1780s. But another reads the evidence as proof of little vertical mobility in the 1770s and even less in the 1780s. The former finds upward movement in improvement or modest increase in property held; the latter dismisses as "trivial" changes in wealth or occupation unaccompanied by change in an individual's "position." On the one hand, abundance of land and shortage of labor made America the "best poor man's country"; on the other, the great majority of rich men were born to wealth or prominence, and wealth became more unequally distributed with the passage of time, particularly in towns and cities. African-Americans, who had, of course, come to America involuntarily, moved not upward but more firmly into enslavement after the mid-seventeenth century. Although a minority of skilled blacks did improve their economic lot, the status of all African-Americans was low, even those who became free.
The American Revolution had important social and economic as well as political consequences. Among other things, it resulted in the confiscation of Loyalists' estates and the appearance in the new state legislatures of many men of modest circumstances. The Loyalists' lands, however, most often wound up in the hands of substantial speculators, not those of small purchasers. The "new men" who thrived financially during the War for Independence did not supplant older wealth so much as supplement it.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the American economy took off. Booms in transportation, banking, commerce, and manufacturing enticed Europeans, mainly Germans and Irish, to come to the "fabled republic" in unprecedented numbers. The wealth of the nation increased dramatically and surely opened opportunities for at least modest gains to many. But the wealth was distributed more unequally than ever. Far from having suffered "the sting of want" as youngsters, the nation's richest men were almost invariably born to families of wealth and renown. The great majority of Americans, though by no means poverty-stricken, nevertheless owned few worldly goods and enjoyed little improvement in their condition during what used to be called "the era of the common man." Clever politicians and publicists outdid one another in praising "Tom, Dick, and Harry," but in fact ordinary people had little influence as well as little property other than a patch of land. The movement they experienced was more often geographical than vertical, as families facing poor prospects in their home communities moved to new locales. The depressions following the financial panics of 1837 and 1857 had disastrous effects on most families. But the well-to-do, whether in the urban Northeast or the rural West, not only survived but thrived. Detailed studies disclose that the rich got richer during hard times.
The post-Civil War decades saw the rise of big business, the emergence of the United States as the wealthiest and most industrialized nation in the world, and the appearance of vast fortunes, many of them attributed to social upstarts. But after observing that in fact no more than 3 percent of the nation's leading business tycoons had earlier been poor immigrant or farm boys, one historian wryly concluded that such poor lads who rose high had "always been more conspicuous in American history books than in American history."
If the top business leadership of the nation came inordinately from upper-class parents, studies of small communities have revealed a more fluid pattern. Thus, in Paterson, New Jersey, most metal industry manufacturers who opened small shops and factories had started out as workers. In late-nineteenth-century Newburyport, Massachusetts, the sons of blue-collar fathers remained in their class, but they did amass modest amounts of property and improved their lot. In the South, race and ethnicity significantly affected mobility rates, with blacks and Mexican-Americans lagging behind whites. In Michigan, whether rural or urban, an impressive upward movement during the decade after the Civil War had come to a halt by century's end.
Twentieth-century mobility has been intensively studied, above all by sociologists. They have traced the origins of the rich and successful, the occupational careers of entire city populations, the life histories of men and women in hundreds of occupations, the comparative chances of black and white youngsters, the characteristics of upwardly mobile women and downwardly mobile "skidders," and the effects on vertical mobility of people's emotional states, education, expectations, and religion, among other variables. The resultant social portrait is, unsurprisingly, complex, but it does not markedly modify earlier trends.
For the most part, the well-to-do and highly successful were born to advantage. What upward movement people experienced was usually "small-distanced": though they might hold a great variety of jobs in the course of a lifetime, most people in the end arrived at an occupational destination similar in prestige to the job they started out with. On the other hand, structural change, such as the sharp decline in agricultural work or the increasing replacement of blue-collar by white-collar work, gave many sons and daughters jobs that commanded greater prestige—if not higher real wages—than their parents had earned. After World War II, African-Americans in the North enjoyed a significant enhancement in work opportunities, and all Americans benefited from a remarkable increase in college enrollments. But differentiation in the standing and reputation of schools or professions was usually masked by the quantitative data that are the stuff of statistical studies. In life it mattered a great deal whether one attended a slum school or a prestigious prep school, or if one was a lawyer, whether one scratched out a living as a court-assigned attorney for the indigent or earned a large income as solicitor to the corporate mighty.
The complexity of the American situation is well revealed in a study of the composers of popular songs between the world wars. They appear to have been marvelously gifted, but abetting their success were their highly advantageous beginnings; almost all of them were born to parents occupying the upper tenth of the American social and economic structure. And not the least interesting finding of recent research is that vertical mobility rates in the twentieth-century United States are remarkably similar to those elsewhere in the industrial world.
Seymour M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (1959); Edward Pessen, ed., Three Centuries of Social Mobility in America (1974); Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (1963).
Edward Pessen
See also Democracy in America; Education; Wealth and Its Distribution.
