6.10 Development of the Middle Class

Huge corporations needed people to run them: managers, accountants, clerks, typists, salespeople and engineers. These are white-collar jobs, meaning office work rather than manual labor. The professions, such as law, medicine and engineering, also grew and formed associations that set standards.

Many of the new office workers were young women. The typewriter and telephone created jobs as typists, stenographers and operators that were seen as respectable. Women's wages were lower than men's, and most left paid work after marrying.

Education expanded to train these workers. Public high schools multiplied, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. Colleges grew too, including land-grant universities funded by the Morrill Act (1862) and new women's colleges such as Smith and Wellesley (both opened 1875).

The middle class had money to spend and time to spend it. Department stores such as Macy's in New York and Marshall Field's in Chicago displayed goods in grand buildings. Mail-order catalogs from Montgomery Ward and Sears brought the same goods to farm families. Brand names and advertising spread.

Commercial leisure grew: professional baseball (the National League formed in 1876), college football, vaudeville theater, amusement parks like Coney Island, and the bicycle craze of the 1890s. Leisure was also shaped by class. Middle-class families might visit city parks or take seaside vacations; working-class people went to dance halls and saloons; the very rich built enormous mansions.

The richest families displayed their fortunes openly. Economist Thorstein Veblen called this 'conspicuous consumption' in 1899.

In 1889 Andrew Carnegie published an essay later known as the Gospel of Wealth. He accepted big gaps between rich and poor as a natural result of competition. But he argued that a rich person was a trustee of wealth for society and should give most of it away during their lifetime, funding things that help people help themselves. He wrote that a man who dies rich dies disgraced.

Carnegie followed through, paying for well over 1,600 public libraries in the U.S., plus concert halls and universities. John D. Rockefeller funded the University of Chicago, and Leland Stanford founded Stanford University.

Critics noted that the same fortunes came partly from low wages and harsh labor practices, like those behind the Homestead Strike at Carnegie's own mill in 1892. Philanthropy also let the rich decide what society needed without a public vote.

Horatio Alger's popular novels told of poor boys who rose through hard work, honesty and a lucky break. These 'rags to riches' stories fit the self-made-man image of Carnegie himself. In reality, most business leaders of the era came from middle- or upper-class families, and most workers did not rise far, though some moved up modestly.