Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 79, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 December 1919 — WHO ARE THE MIDDLE CLASS [ARTICLE]

WHO ARE THE MIDDLE CLASS

Brain Workers Who Are Compelled t* * Do Manual Labor to Eke Out an Existence. Few forces tend so strongly to produce social consciousness as a grievance. Not so many years ago one might have searched the world and found nobody who would admit he was of the middle class, remarks the New York Times. The term was an epithet used in derision. As the middle class was vaguely supposed to be respectable, respectability itself went out of fashion. Today all this is altered. People write to the papers to say they are of the middle class and they say is with ah air of one who after all is somebody. Yet nobody has defined the middle class, even' the sociologists and economists, whose business such tilings are. In England. W. H. Mallock gave a few stray thoughts to the subject and concluded it is middle class to have an Income of some $730. Prof. 11. R. Seagej stated in America the figure would have to be raised to $1,150. It Is the way of the elder sociologists-to write as if the determining factor is always mondy. Our common sense knows better. The middle class is distinguished from the class on its one hand-by the fact that it works, not with one’s body, but with its mind. It is distinguished from the class on its other hand by the fact that, not having sufficient capital to retire upon, it has to work. The middleclass man is a brain worker, who is obliged to work or go under. And he is obliged to Conform to current standards of respectability* physically as well as mentally and morally. In the nineteenth century the- Income standards had at least a shadow of justification, for wages and salaries still maintained some definite relationship to the character of work done and service rendered. Today we have changed all that and with one notable result. A large group of people among us have become class conscious—those, namely, who do professional work, for less than the pay of a hand laborer. Mentally and morally they have two strong props of character —the fact that the instrument of their labor is the mind and the fact that they are urged on by necessity to use it.