Great Depressions and the Middle Class: Experts, Collegiate Youth and Business Ideology, 1929–1941 (review)

Languages of class and discourses about class are minefields through which historians take steps at some risk. This monograph by Mary C. McComb on how college youth and experts negotiate their class identity as "middle class" during the economic crises of the Great Depression enters this conceptual quagmire, but although she occasionally comes close to tripping a fuse, she emerges with some illuminating pathways.

McComb has crafted a tidy research monograph with well chosen cases in order to focus on the formation of a class-based discourse on middle-class identity in a decade when the economic basis of class privilege was undermined by weakened depression-era prospects. Close readings of student newspapers at five colleges and Universities contrast the views of relatively privileged Amherst College men with those of their female peers at Mount Holyoke. She then sets these perspectives against those of less elite collegiate youth at two additional private institutions, but in these cases coeducational schools in urban settings (Washington, DC) with distinctly different racial student bodies—the white George Washington University and the black Howard University. Finally, McComb fills out her research with the case of students from a land grant public university, the University of Michigan, where she was completing the dissertation on which this book was based.

This comparisons allows McComb to trace differences by gender and race at the same time as she surveys the range of the relatively privileged slice of American youth who attended college during the 1930s.

McComb complements her study of college youth's views with those presented in 200 advice manuals by self-appointed "experts", arguing these manuals represent views that are in a symbiotic relationship with those of the students. Noting college students were groomed to assume positions in the "professional-managerial class," (rather than as professional workers who struggle to define themselves as middle class and give varied meanings to that identity), she presumes her students middle-class identity even as she studies their discourse on class. McComb, building usefully on Pierre Bourdieu's work, avers that "class is defined as much by its being as by its perception" and rejects a "purely economic model" to examine the "fields" in which college life provides symbolic capital. [19] In this regard, this book wonderfully elucidates college jobs, the college marriage market, fraternities and sororities, and rituals of college life as "fields" in which students mark status hierarchies as alternatives to marketplace accumulation in a depressed market. A discourse on class emerges with striking racial and gendered distinctions in particular, but class becomes mostly discourse. McComb provides scarce sense of how this "middle" imagines itself and "others" in a world of economic inequality and power; indeed, this study offers only glimpses of alternative, oppositional or liminal class meanings in a world rife with radical ideologies with competing class languages.

The book's first two substantive chapters emphasize material from college newspapers to describe college life in the first half of the decade. These are quite rich, lively discussions of the cultural work of class formation in which we see how, in an era of economic instability, white and black men and women use rituals, social power and the gendered and racialized "traditions" of the day about "appropriate" roles for men and women to establish status on campus. McComb is quite terrific in illustrating how students demark "male" and "female" spaces and establish "middle-class standards" for behavior, notably in the classroom and club life and on campus jobs (which are fundamentally service work). The analysis of Greek life is particularly strong and in the role of "Independents" suggests the complexities within the class where "others" claim alternative social spaces.

The final chapters bring the discussion forward to the last half of the decade. Again, in detailing how college youth are socialized into traditional gender norms, these chapters elaborate in rich detail the dating and "rating...