Veblen Updated

...coming down through Davis and Dollard, William F. (Streetcorner Society) Whyte, and Lloyd Warner, to Kinsey, C. Wright Mills, John Dean and Robin Williams, and William H. (Organization Man) Whyte...

...The diploma guarantees nothing, but without it one has almost no chance of crossing the line...

...He writes as though he were the first to bring the bad news to a world blinded by the city lights...

...only Veblen, among Packard's direct forebears, never learned how to make protest pay...

...Through my college classes year after year pass boys from Supporting-Class families, many of whom will without doubt shortly be men of the Semi-Upper, above me in income almost immediately, and eventually in social status...

...Indeed, one of the saving graces of America has been its encouragement of the outraged optimists who painted a black picture of their society because they refused to accept the good-enough gray...

...The mark of the reformer is always indignation and overstatement, and it is irrelevant for the reviewer to cavil at what seems to him to be exaggeration...

...indeed, he insists that it is not...

...Some of Packard's shocked revelations about what he describes as developments peculiar to the 1950s could be found almost verbatim in the protest literature of every decade since the 1830s...

...But this is almost impossible to measure, and Packard does not pretend to offer definitive, IBM-coded proof...

...But no one familiar with the history of America's past century will find anything novel in what he says...

...Like The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers is a shocker that doesn't shock, but tells us in a tone of righteous moralism what we already know...

...class lines are hardening: the American Dream has not come true...

...Instead of a country in which almost everyone belongs to some part of the great middle class, Packard sees a society in which the upper part of the middle class has broken away and joined the elite, leaving behind them the great number of the strivers who find that without a college degree their ceiling is sharply limited, whether they are blue- or white-collar workers...

...The Status Seekers belongs in the great tradition of American protest literature...

...Significant upward mobility today depends on the acquisition of the college diploma, whereas it did not to such an extent previously...

...At times he reminds one of that familiar American figure, the smalltown boy who has come to the city—and through it to the suburb or exurb—and who looks nostalgically back upon the good old friendly days at the home he had escaped from, those long lonely days when he did not have to take part in the brightly lighted rat race he had left to shine in and would now not give up for anything...

...There is something intensely American in the horrified fascination with which we examine our status symbols, as though they were religious taboos which we were forbidden to touch but could not resist fingering...

...But when he goes on to insist that "class lines in America are becominng more rigid," and that it is growing ever harder to get into the Diploma Elite, he claims more than he can prove...

...Actually, on this point, we are entering the realm of feeling rather than fact, and Packard moves from description and analysis to rhetoric and exhortation...

...Packard's primary contribution is his definition of the present-day class structure...

...But opportunity to reach the very top is not the issue...

...But it leads me to wonder if the promises of American life are really dimming as much as Packard seems to think they are...

...intimacy between employer and employe is lost: opportunities for the ambitious little entrepreneur are decreasing...

...Reviewed by John Lydenberg Professor of English, Hobart and William Smith Colleges THE STATUS SEEKERS presents a reviewer—particularly the belated reviewer—with a dilemma...

...And his book is in part a compendium of citations from the standard works, going back to the Lynds in the '20s...

...What surprises about the book is neither its message nor its success, but the surprise the author seems to feel at what he has discovered and is impelled to reveal to Americans about their society...

...Discarding the traditional, tripartite upper-middle-lower breakdown, Packard describes the two-way split as consisting of the Diploma Elite, subdivided into the Real Upper and the Semi-Upper, and the Supporting Classes, made up of the Limited-Success, the Working, and the Real Lower...

...If sometimes they sound febrile as they chastise us in their high-pitched voices, we must remind ourselves how sick our society would be without them...

...In our city, newly prosperous small businessmen are moving steadily from their Working-Class parents' homes across the tracks into the shaded old Republican wards, and into the treeless ranch developments, giving every evidence that their children will be accepted and continue to move on up, above their successful parents...

...He cites figures to show that of the top men in industry fewer come from working-class backgrounds today than formerly...

...Nor has my experience—restricted as it is, compared with Packard's—shown me a hardening of class lines...

...Armed with the sharpest, shiniest new weapons of Madison Avenue, Packard rides out on the familiar trails to slay the dragons that American reformers have warred against ever since the dream of a democratic Utopia burgeoned in this New World...

...He is also peculiarly American in the way in which he writes as though somehow a class structure, status symbols and the striving for prestige were undesirable, immoral and even unnecessary...

...He finds that "two quite sharply divided major groupings of social classes are emerging, with the old middle class being split into two distinct classes...

...He uses all these studies, and many more, to bolster his contention that, contrary to the popular view, present-day America is not progressing toward the classless society envisaged in the American Creed and the American Dream...

...My reading of the books Packard cites has not led me to his conclusion on this point...

...Most of Packard's worries about recent developments are not less justified than were the warnings of his indignant predecessors...

...If he makes an honest buck at the same time, who can take umbrage...

...Henry George drew huge audiences here and abroad...

...While we learn to snicker informedly at the ostentation of our new neighbor down the hill, we can at the same time get tips on the correct gestures to make toward our neighbor further up "Justamere Drive...

...The question then is whether it is actually harder for Supporting-Class children to get to college now than it previously was for them to get into the old upper or upper-middle class...

...In part, The Status Seekers is merely Veblen updated, sometimes quite hilariously...

...Social scientists can be cool and objective and safe...

...Many of its illustrations of status seeking are so amusingly extreme as obviously to apply more to the "others" than to us...

...If it turns an unpleasant light on our own selves, it makes us feel that everyone else is equally— and, we incline to think, even more—guilty...

...Part of its appeal probably lies in the fact that, in addition to making us feel superior by showing how those others are duped by the admen, it also serves as a sort of Emily Guidepost to more elite living...

...For the rest, it echoes the old plaints about our business civilization: Bigness has become a curse...

...I would not offer this as proof that class lines axe softening rather than hardening...

...If their direst predictions have seldom come true, we may ascribe part of the failure to the vehemence with which they prophesied gloom and doom...

...This classification strikes me as accurate and useful...

...He has read all the relevant sociological studies—a not inconsiderable task for anyone who has the sensitivity to style that Packard apparently has...

...Upton Sinclair hit the best-seller lists as often as not...

...Those who would awaken us to the perils of the course we are thoughtlessly following are obliged to shout loudly and describe the dangers luridly...

...Nor is it easy to criticize an anti-complacency tract without seeming to enter the camp of the complacent enemy...

...Emerson was a Lyceum star...

...It bounced so quickly to the top of the bestseller list, and it followed so soon after the sensational Hidden Persuaders, that all one's in-manship instincts lead one to dismiss it as a glib popularization, another Fairfield County slick...

...Yet since the author is obviously on the side of the angels, at a time when angels are so few or silent, one feels obliged to recognize and encourage one's own...

...Stuart Chase's popularizations of the latest good ideas must have brought adequate financial rewards...

...Packard does not pretend that the view of contemporary American society he presents is peculiarly his own...