On the Edge

This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. We’re talking today about the history of the middle class in America. So far we’ve been talking as though this somewhat ambiguous category has its roots in the end of the 19th century and really took shape a few decades later.

But I recently sat down with somebody who managed to dig up, and I mean dig up, some stuff that back dates our story a whole lot earlier.

CHRISTINA HODGE: We found trash, foundations, privies, all sorts of stuff archaeologists love.

PETER: This is Christina Hodge. She’s an archaeologist at Stanford, who spent a decade sifting through the castoffs of one Elizabeth Pratt, a widowed shopkeeper in Newport, Rhode Island, all the way back in the 1700s.

It would, of course, be anachronistic to the label Pratt middle class. But it would be fair to call her one of the middling sorts, who were just beginning to coalesce into a recognizable social group at this time. A big part of that was about defining themselves against what they were not– poor or rich. It was a process of making consumer choices, choices that could look to us through the haze of time as, well, somewhat contradictory.

CHRISTINA HODGE: She spent some money on very fancy cuts of meat, but had really difficult life with parasitic diseases. From documentary records, we know that she had to sell all of her pewter plates at one point to make money. But she still spent money on a silk riding hood.

She had a really messy yard, but invested heavily in porcelain tea wares. Proportionally, percentage wise, she had as many porcelain wares as elite planters in Maryland or elite families in Massachusetts. But she had this tiny house. So the question was why where there’s so many porcelain tea wares there, and why weren’t there are other things, punch bowls or plates.

This was a time when people were starting to develop individual place settings as a fancy way of dining. So why wasn’t she as interested in that as she was interested in tea wares.

PETER: Some people would say, oh, she just wants to be the kind of person who has this stuff with all that silk and porcelain and so forth. But you don’t think that’s a fair characterization? That she’s not buying up, as it were? She’s not making believe that she’s a Bourgeois person?

CHRISTINA HODGE: I don’t think so. I think that’s too narrow an interpretation of what was going on. And it doesn’t really take non-elite people, middling sorts or other sorts, lower sorts, seriously as historical agents, as knowing consumers. When you start looking at the material culture in her house versus the material culture in her neighbors homes, for example, other middling sorts or even the elites, there’s not a predictable pattern. Everybody was doing it a little bit differently, but they were doing it at the same time.

So just saying that she was just copying others doesn’t explain what we were finding. And so we had to look– or I had to look for a different explanation for what was going on and how she was creating this idea of the middling sorts every day through everything she chose to do.

PETER: Now it sounds like Elizabeth was pushing her luck on some occasions or at least stretching her resources. So in a way, the great concern for somebody in her physician would be that she couldn’t sustain it.

CHRISTINA HODGE: Yes, that’s true, especially because she was a woman. And women’s control over their bodies, their property was so tenuous.

She did not purchase her home, she did not become a shopkeeper until after she was widowed and was able to take those steps legally. But as economic circumstances changed, she actually ended up in a series of lawsuits with both of her sons-in-law over her house, over her shop of goods, which they wanted.

And ultimately, she was no longer in control of that shop. It went to one son-in-law. She was no longer paying for her own way in the world, that was part of a lawsuit between the two sons-in-law that someone had to support her. So that real precarious grasps she had on the middle class through entrepreneurialship through financial solvency, through property ownership slipped away.

PETER: Yeah, so to be a female in that world was to be in a truly liminal position as a middling sort. Women were not supposed to be independent under the law of coverture and the conventions of the day.

CHRISTINA HODGE: Exactly.

PETER: As you’re talking about these middling sorts of people, Christina, I’m thinking Benjamin Franklin’s phrase, “happy mediocrity.” If you can imagine being mediocre and happy today it’s, well, it’s hard to imagine that. But I think that speaks to this idea that there is actually value and virtue in achieving this kind of independence. And that this is the bedrock of a good society.

CHRISTINA HODGE: I think that’s absolutely part of the value that were emerging at this time. And the idea that this was something you could define for yourselves, certainly with reference to other groups, but it looks different for everyone. So you have those shared values, but kind of idiosyncratic, strategic, material expressions of this, depending on who you are.

I think it’s part of what we see in the consumerism and definitions of middling sort in the 18th century all the way through today, where everybody thinks– maybe not everybody– but a lot of people identify as middle class or in the middle, even though there’s a wide range of behaviors and these things have shifted over time.

PETER: Christina Hodge is the academic curator and collections manager of Stanford University’s archaeology collections. She’s the author of Consumerism and the Emergence of the Middle Class in Colonial America.