is a country of self-made men, than which nothing better could be said of any state of society.
The self-deception of Colton (there was slavery in the South, and in the North the factory system had a brutal grip on many Americans) applies to every period of this country’s history, from our colonial origins to our imperial present. The fact is, we were born far from free, and far from equal, and through centuries of enormous growth in territory, resources, population, that initial inequality continued.
Why, then, does the myth persist?
Judgments depend on the criteria we use. Americans, evaluating their own country, generally use as their base other places in the world. In all the harping on the special equalitarianism of America, what is really implied, and only occasionally stated, is not that we were really free or really equal but that we were more free and equal than Europe. A new society, physically open and structurally loose, does have—for a time, in some of its parts, to a certain degree—more opportunities for changing one’s status than an old, encrusted society.
Even this comparative statement about American equality depends for its truth on one enormous premise: that we not count the black slaves in America (20 percent of the population on the eve of the American revolution). It started early—the bland assessment of this country after putting the slaves aside. This is one of the unchanging aspects of our self-evaluation—that we mention the Negro with proper lamentation, and then put him in brackets while we make our total judgment of American civilization. Both slavery and segregation have always been treated as special phenomena, to be mentioned then forgotten, because they spoil all estimates about democracy, freedom, and equality in this country.
But even aside from this dishonesty, there is something wrong with the use of other countries—Europe, or Asia to make the contrast even more dramatic—as a basis for evaluation. Why not use as our norm the ideal society, that which has never existed on earth, that mythic society which has eliminated (to use Jacques
Barzun’s phrase) “irrational privilege.” I would call irrational that privilege which comes from the distorted distribution of abundant resources.
The distinction between these two criteria (Europe’s rigid class system on the one hand; an ideal society on the other) is not that the first is realistic (comparing us with existing reality elsewhere), while the other is idealistic (measuring us against a goal unattained anywhere). Both are realistic, in the sense that they have effects on reality. But the first suits a historical scholarship which uses the past not only as its starting point but as its end; the second suits a view of history which is designed to change the present toward a desired future. Both kinds of historiography are able to use, with accuracy and competence, the data of the past. But the choice of criteria makes one kind of history contemplative, academic, and the other kind existential, active.
What follows then is a discussion of class inequality in America, drawing briefly on data from two periods—the colonial and the contemporary. The point is not to conclusively prove something about America, but rather to suggestively question the happy myth of equalitarianism, as a way of prodding us to bolder changes than so far called forth by the “welfare state.”
THE LESS THAN IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
A hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the first revolt broke out in the American colonies, not against England, but against the entrenched power of the Virginia aristocracy. A Royal Commission’s confidential report to the crown, after the rebellion had been suppressed and its leaders hanged, described the leader of the 1676 uprising, Nathaniel Bacon: 3
… a person whose lost and desperate fortunes had thrown him into that remote part of the world about fourteen months before and fram’d him fitt for such a purpose. … He was said to be about four or five and thirty yeares of age, indifferent tall but slender, black-hair’d and of an ominous, pensive, melancholly Aspect, of a pestilent and prevalent Logical discourse tending to atheisme. … he seduced the Vulgar and most ignorant people to believe (two thirds of each county being of that Sort) Soe that theire whole hearts and hopes were set now upon Bacon. Next he charges the Governour as negligent and wicked, treacherous and incapable, the Lawes and Taxes as unjust and oppressive and cryes up absolute necessity of redress. Thus Bacon encouraged the Tumult and as the unquiet crowd follow and adhere to him, he listeth them as they come in upon a large paper, writing their name circular wise, that their Ring-Leaders might not be found out. Having connur’d them into this circle, given them Brandy to wind up the charme, and enjoyn’d them by an oath to stick fast together and to him … and the oath being administered he went and infected New Kent County ripe for Rebellion.
The rebellion was a complex phenomenon, immediately stirred by the feeling of frontier farmers that the Virginia government was ignoring their needs, but its essence was a rising of a lower class against the privileges, political and economic, of a higher class. A contemporary of Bacon’s, Thomas Mathews, wrote of the debate in the Virginia Assembly over motions to inspect the tax structure, which the governor asked to be delayed, “tho’ such of that Indigent People as had no benefits from the Taxes groand under our being thus Overborn.” 4
Our first settlers brought with them across the ocean the class distinctions of the Old World. The American wilderness modified and complicated these distinctions, but it did not eliminate them. And the more the population grew—the greater the wealth, the more complex the society—the sharper became the differences between upper and lower classes. The white indentured servant supplied the basic lower-class labor force in the seventeenth century, the Negro slave in the eighteenth century, both supplemented by town laborers of various types. At the upper levels of society there grew a colonial aristocracy, whose way of life separated it more and more from the lower classes. The fact that in between these extremes was a fairly large middle class of independent small farmers mitigated the total amount of deprivation, and also served to block out—as this middle class has done throughout American history—the vision of a significant part of the population (about one-third of the total) in physical or economic bondage.
But even that landowning yeoman class, except for a small number who managed to push up through the social apertures, was shut off from real economic or political power. Bacon’s Rebellion, like a number of other colonial uprisings, was a spontaneous foaming of indignation on the part of this class. Nathaniel Bacon complained, a year before his revolt, in 1675: “The poverty of the country is such that all the power and sway is got into the hands of the rich, who by extortious advantages, having the common people in their debt, have always curbed and oppressed them in all manner of ways.”
By 1700, there were fifty families in Virginia with wealth equivalent to $50,000, a huge sum for those days, especially for a new frontier society. These fifty families sat at the pinnacle of a pyramid whose broad base was the labor of indentured servants and slaves. The rich families owned the plantations, sat on the governor’s council, served as local magistrates. In Maryland, where the settlers were under the rule of a semi-feudal proprietor whose right to control the whole colony had been granted by the English King, there were five revolts between 1650 and 1689 against the proprietor.
The claim that America was “born free” is sometimes traced to the fact that the new nation borrowed the ideas of John Locke. But it was Locke himself who wrote the “Fundamental Constitutions” of the Carolinas, which set up a feudal-type aristocracy, headed by eight seigniors, and eight barons, who would own 40 percent of the colony’s land. Only the head of a barony could be governor, the Fundamental Constitutions provided; and only owners of five hundred acres could be deputies in the assembly. The attempt of the proprietors to enforce these arrangements under frontier conditions led to conflict and martial law. The Fundamental Constitutions never were able to work as planned, but a small group of wealthy proprietors did run the colony as absentee landlords. A conflict over control of the land led to a revolt in 1719. While the immediate cause of the revolt was the land-hunger of five hundred poor immigrants, the uprising was taken over by the large rice planters and English merchants, who succeeded in getting rid of the proprietors in order to obtain a royal government which would favor their interests. In North Carolina, which became a separate crown colony, half a million acres were