Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

All these causes acted to destroy the middle classes by acting to destroy the middle-class outlook. And this outlook was destroyed, not by adult middle-class persons abandoning it, but by a failure or inability of parents to pass it on to their children. Moreover, this failure was largely restricted to the middle class itself and not to the petty bourgeoisie (lower middle class), which, if anything, was clinging to its particular version of the middle-class outlook more tenaciously and was passing it on to its offspring in an even more intensified form.

What I am saying here is that the disintegration of the middle class arose from a failure to transfer its outlook to its children. This failure was thus a failure of education, and may seem, at first glance, to be all the more surprising, since our education system has been, consciously or unconsciously, organized as a mechanism for indoctrination of the young in middle-class ideology. In fact, rather surprisingly, it would appear that our educational system, unlike those of continental Europe, has been more concerned with indoctrination of middle-class outlook than with teaching patriotism or nationalism. As a reflection of this, it has been more concerned with instilling attitudes and behavior than with intellectual training. In view of the fact that the American ideals of the 1920’s were as much middle class as patriotic, with the so-called “American way of life” identified rather with the American economic and social system than with the American political system, and the fact that a majority of schoolchildren were not from middle-class families, it is not surprising that the educational system was devoted to training in the middle-class outlook. Children of racial, religious, national, and class minorities all passed through the same system and received the middle-class formative process, with, it must be recognized, incomplete success in many cases. This refers to the public schools, but the Roman Catholic school system, especially on its upper levels, was doing the same things. The large number of Catholic men’s colleges in the country, especially those operated by the Jesuits, had as their basic, if often unrecognized, aim the desire to transform the sons of working class, and often of immigrant, origins into middle-class people in professional occupations (chiefly law, medicine, business, and teaching).

On the whole, this system was, until recently, a success, but is now becoming less and less successful in turning out middle-class people, especially from its upper educational levels. This failure can be attributed rather to the context within which the educational system has operated than to a failure of the system itself. As we shall see in a moment, this failure occurred chiefly within the middle-class family, a not unexpected situation, since outlook is still determined rather by reaction to family conditions than by submission to a formal educational process.

Much of the disintegration of the middle-class outlook can be traced to a weakening of its chief aspects, such as future preference, intense self-discipline, and, to a lesser degree, to a decreasing emphasis on infinitely expandable material demand and on the importance of middle-class status symbols. Only a few of the factors that have influenced these changes can be mentioned here.

The chief external factor in the destruction of the middle-class outlook has been the relentless attack upon it in literature and drama through most of the twentieth century. In fact, it is difficult to find works that defended this outlook or even assumed it to be true, as was frequent in the nineteenth century. Not that such works did not exist in recent years; they have existed in great numbers, and have been avidly welcomed by the petty bourgeoisie and by some middle-class housewives. Lending libraries and women’s magazines of the 1910’s, 1920’s, and 1930’s were full of them, but, by the 1950’s they were largely restricted to television soap dramas. Even those writers who explicitly accepted the middle-class ideology, like Booth Tarkington, Ben Ames Williams, Sloan Wilson, or John O’Hara, tended to portray middle-class life as a horror of false values, hypocrisy, meaningless effort, and insecurity. In Alice Adams, for example, Tarkington portrayed a lower-middle-class girl, filled with hypocrisy and materialistic values, desperately seeking a husband who would provide her with the higher social status for which she yearned.

In the earlier period, even down to 1940, literature’s attack on the middle-class outlook was direct and brutal, from such works as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Frank Norris’s The Pit , both dealing with the total corruption of personal integrity in the meatpacking and wheat markets. These early assaults were aimed at the commercialization of life under bourgeois influence and were fundamentally reformist in outlook because they assumed that the evils of the system could somehow be removed, perhaps by state intervention. By the 1920’s the attack was much more total, and saw the problem in moral terms so fundamental that no remedial action was possible. Only complete rejection of middle-class values could remove the corruption of human life seen by Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt or Main Street .

After 1940, writers tended less and less to attack the bourgeois way of life; that job had been done. Instead they described situations, characters, and actions that were simply nonbourgeois: violence, social irresponsibility, sexual laxity and perversion, miscegenation, human weakness in relation to alcohol, narcotics, or sex, or domestic and business relationships conducted along completely nonbourgeois lines. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, and a host of lesser writers, many of them embracing the cult of violence, showed the trend. A very popular work like The Lost Weekend could represent the whole group. A few, like Hemingway, found a new moral outlook to replace the middle-class ideology they had abandoned. In Hemingway’s case he shook the dust of upper-middle-class Oak Park, Illinois, off his feet and immersed himself in the tragic sense of life of Spain with its constant demand upon men to demonstrate their virility by incidental activity with women and unflinching courage in facing death. To Hemingway this could be achieved in the bullring, in African big-game hunting, in war or, in a more symbolic way, in prizefighting or crime. The significant point here is that Hemingway’s embrace of the outlook of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis as a token of his rejection of his middle-class background was always recognized by him as a pretense, and, when his virility, in the crudest sense, was gone, he blew out his brains.

The literary assault on the bourgeois outlook was directed at all the aspects of it that we have mentioned, at future preference, at self-discipline, at the emphasis on materialistic acquisition, at status symbols. The attack on future preference appeared as a demonstration that the future is never reached. Its argument was that the individual who constantly postpones living from the present (with living taken to mean real personal relationships with individuals) to a hypothetical future eventually finds that the years have gone by, death is approaching, he has not yet lived, and is, in most cases, no longer able to do so. If the central figure in such a work has achieved his materialist ambitions, the implication is that these achievements, which looked so attractive from a distance, are but encumbrances to the real values of personal living when achieved. This theme, which goes back at least to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol or to George Eliot’s Silas Marner , continued to be presented into the twentieth century. It often took the form, in more recent times, of a rejection of a man’s whole life achievement by his sons, his wife, or himself.