The growth of a middle class both in the United States and certain European societies can be attributed to several factors. The move toward urbanization, the “new” or second Industrial Revolution, and increased consumerism all played significant roles in middle class development. In some countries this was more rapid, such as in England, known as a nation of “shop-keepers and merchants.” Further, class consciousness in Europe evolved differently from that in the United States where an upper class of plutocrats associated with industrial monopolies developed and where no traditional aristocracy held sway to remind society of a once powerful Old Regime.
Urbanization and Middle Class Growth
By 1880 London was the largest European city with 4,470 (thousands) of people, followed by Paris with 2,269. By 1910, London’s population swelled to 7,256 while the figures for Paris represent a very modest gain totaling 2,888, only slightly higher than Berlin and Vienna. The rise of cities was tied to industrialization as well as the ancillary growth of support enterprises such as department stores, professional establishments (doctors), banks and commercial enterprises, expanding educational facilities, and transportation.
According to David Landes, “there was…the steady process of urbanization, which introduced millions of rustics to a more expansive way of life.” (243) Landes refers to creature comforts hitherto unknown, detailing social practices in the middle class like the consumption of eggs and bacon at breakfast as a normal, regular diet (246) or the growth in production of ready-to-wear clothing and shoes. Landes, as well as Asa Briggs, points out that even though wages fell in the 1880s, growing consumerism kept the overall economy healthy.
Consumerism and the Middle Class
Consumerism produced what Benjamin Disraeli described as a “convulsion of prosperity.” This consumerism was possible because of the advances made in manufacturing during the New Industrial Revolution. Even members of the working classes, themselves divided into hierarchies of skilled and unskilled, could aspire to the middle class. Often, this was achieved generationally as workers pursued lower middle class positions. Landes states that between 1851 and the latter years of economic and industrial expansion, the number of domestic servants increased by 60%.
Refrigerated ships brought meat to European middle class tables as well as American wheat. Even the middle class, in England, partook in afternoon tea while families at the lowest rung of the middle class hierarchy had at least one or two servants. What was happening in England was also true in Germany and France as well as the United States where an increasing professional class of managers and professionals were affecting social considerations and politics.
Politics and the New Middle Class
The middle class acted as a buffer between the wealthy owners of production, the “chimney aristocrats” whose new money fortunes rivaled the older noble classes, and the working class, Marx’s proletariat. As members of the middle class prospered and, as in the case of Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, received benefits such as a form of social security, the cries of the socialists were blunted.
The middle class supported law and order as well as parliamentary reform. In the United States, the middle class registered its rejection of labor unionism and striker violence in the elections of 1894 and 1896, the latter referred to by Henry James as an outcome of “revolution or rout.”
In many ways, the success of industrialization coincided with the expansion of an urbanized middle class that fed on growing consumerism, ultimately creating prosperous societies. The example of France, lagging behind Britain, Germany, and the United States is revealing in that France would continue to be predominantly rural and agricultural into the 20th century. This was also the case of Russia where 50 million people were peasants.
Sources:
Asa Briggs, A Social History of England (New York: the Viking Press, 1983).
David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
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