Book Review : The Allegiance to the Middle Class

The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class by Loren Baritz (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95, 346 pages)

Late in the Depression, social historian Loren Baritz reports in “The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class,” about 88% of the respondents in a Gallup poll claimed to belong to the middle class, even though half of them reported income either higher or lower than middle class. The American dream, in other words, is literally a middle-class dream.

Baritz has thought deeply about what “the good life” means to the American middle class, and his book is a careful, even meticulous explanation of its psychological, cultural and even sexual underpinnings throughout our history. The yearning for a new car, a home in the suburbs, a college education for the children--the badges of the middle class, now and forever--are only the most superficial expressions of a philosophy that reflects the enduring values of the American people.

“The middle class was buried . . . in its immediate affairs and present desires, made itself its standard of value and conduct, partly immunized against art and literature, and created a class astigmatism that blurred the continuity of life, while obscuring pleasure and solace once available,” Baritz explains. “It was truly on its own, just where it wanted to be.”

Baritz surveys the irresistible thrust of the middle class throughout American history and proves--if anyone still needs proof--that the genius of America is its ability to channel all classes and all kinds into a single current of polite middle-class aspiration.

Baritz, a history professor at the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts, is a scholar with a sharp eye for the telling details of American life as reflected (or, perhaps more accurately, as shaped) by the mass media, the popular culture, and artificial folkways of fad and fashion.

Thus, for example, Baritz points out that the broad, padded shoulders of men’s suits during the Depression were “apparently designed to emphasize a male’s manliness and power at a time when he needed all the help he could get.” After World War II, when Rosie the Riveter was sent home from the factory, the “mothering” role of the middle-class woman was expressed in a new emphasis on the bosom:

“Bras were reinforced with strong wire and girdles made sufficiently tight to decrease the waist, thereby emphasizing the breasts and hips,” he observes. “A newly engineered mammillary culture now emerged and swept over the resentfully pliant middle-class woman. . . .”

Indeed, what I found most intriguing about “The Good Life” is the author’s facility at tracing the linkages between various phenomena of American life. Thus, for example, he shows us the common values that help to explain the tract homes of suburbia, the ravages of McCarthyism and the emerging religion of pop psychology:

“Almost immediately suburbia’s informality hardened into a rigid conventionality established by the need for like-minded neighbors to like each other,” he writes. “The compulsion to adjust to community norms filled family-room bookcases with self-help, junk psychology, and mindless educational literature, all focus on the joys of belonging. . . . Sen. McCarthy exploited this desire to become indistinguishable from others.”

I detected a subtle change in tone as Baritz confronts the latter days of the American middle class--the so-called Baby Boom, the upheavals of the 1960s, and the anguish and anxiety of the 1980s, as we yearn for “a kinder and gentler America” amid the physical, psychological and social violence of our times. Suddenly, the scholarly detachment of his prose gives way to a more passionate, a more judgmental attitude toward his subject. Significantly, Baritz--a man in his 60s--presents the ‘80s as an intimate conflict between middle-class parents and children who have disappointed each other.

At the very end of “The Good Life,” Baritz turns to poetry, perhaps the most antique and rarefied of social indicators, to express his own insights and, poignantly, his own pain and frustration. The last few words of “The Good Life” are not the words of the scholar or the social scientist--they are, instead, the words of a man’s heart and soul:

“The fathers knew there was risk and pain in love and life,” Baritz concludes. “Fleeing this human adventure, the children calculated their progress toward a better life--the contemplation of all that success may produce, life as work, the happiness produced by objects, the envy of strangers, and the freedom to float above the struggles of others, in warmth and comfort, alone.”