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3. Passing for Normal: Fashioning a Postwar Middle Class
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66 3 Passing for Normal Fashioning a Postwar Middle Class Part of the seductive power of normality was its statistical alignment with the middle: the “normal” curve plotting out the midpoint on a continuum . For postwar Americans, the middle seemed a safe place—secure and solid—not a life on the social or economic fringes. If “normal” meant the middle, the pursuit of “normality” meant becoming, or remaining, middle class. But the postwar middle was shifting ground. A 1959 Look magazine cartoon by Ned Hilton (fig. 17) both acknowledges and lampoons postwar Americans’ obsessions with their own status. A white, suburban housewife is sitting on a couch reading. She pauses to asks her pipe-smoking husband, “Are we in the uppermost upper part of the lower middle class, or the mid-lower part of the upper middle class?” These questions suggest that even in the late 1950s, the most bourgeois Americans were still struggling over their own socioeconomic standing. But the most telling implication of the cartoon was that everyone, at least everyone who read Look magazine, was somewhere in the middle class. In the past, class status might have been determined by a combination of income and occupation, education, and place of residence, but post–World War II economic shifts and public policies brought all of these factors into uneven relation. As affluence became more widespread in the 1950s, income and occupation became less reliable as predictors of class status. The GI Bill made a college education available to a much wider cross-section of Americans, so higher education was no longer a clear mark of income or status. And as millions of GIs flocked with their families to become homeowners in the suburbs, older geographies of class were up- 67 Passing for Normal Figure 17. “Are we in the uppermost upper part of the lower middle class, or the mid-lower part of the upper middle class?” cartoon by Ned Hilton, Look, Aug. 1959. ended as well. Thus while millions of Americans may have been passing into a middle-income range economically, their class status could remain uncertain. For example, census figures show that between 1947 and 1959 median family incomes rose more than twice as fast as living costs—from $4,000 to $5,400, after taking inflation into account—and that by 1959 roughly 40 percent of the nation’s families were in the $5,000 to $10,000 bracket. Fortune magazine found, however, that in 1953, when the median income was $4,242, fully 60 percent of the 15.5 million families in the $4,000–$7,000 income bracket were headed by “blue-collar workers.” A rising income, in other words, did not necessarily signify a move into the middle class in terms of status. A 1950 Chicago study found that clerical workers, who were typically lumped in with professional, managerial, and sales workers as “white collar,” had the education level of managerial workers, but the income level and “residential distribution” of craftsmen and operatives.1 Nevertheless, just as the facts of being middle class were in transition, the feeling of being middle class was solidifying. [18.224.67.149] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 06:27 GMT) Chapter Three 68 The historian Beth Bailey has therefore argued for a “cultural” definition of middle-class in postwar America. She cites statistics that support the notion that a broadening spectrum postwar Americans claimed middleclass status out of a need to be affiliated with the “middle.” One 1953 Purdue University survey, for example, asked a large, representative sample of American high school students to choose among four labels for their family’s social class: upper class, middle class, working class, lower class. Forty-seven percent of the respondents whose fathers were “unskilled laborers ,” 59 percent of those whose fathers had “mid-level jobs working with tools,” 48 percent of those from “low” income families, and 52 percent of those whose mothers had no education beyond grade school all identified themselves as middle-class. Bailey concludes that the general postwar culture was “a culture defined as middle class.”2 In a 1961 article, the sociologist Robert H. Bohlke argued that “values” and “virtues” were the defining characteristics of the middle class, and relegated statistics on income to his footnotes.3 Regardless of their socioeconomic conditions, it seems, postwar individuals felt pressed to “pass” as middle class, an identity that was cast more as a matter of surfaces and appearances than structures or depth. This tension is at...