Sociologist Hits Nail on Head

Herbert J. Gans was a Univ. of PA sociologist who lived in and studied one of the largest suburban communities of the fifties and sixties—Levittown, PA.

When I child, I struggled to understand differences among the families in my neighborhoods. Gans’ descriptions of class subcultures seem a good fit to our East Dallas suburbs. He identifies five:

--Working class
--Lower middle class, restrictive
--Lower middle class, expansive
--Upper middle class, conservative-managerial
--Upper middle class, lib­eral-professional

My home was definitely lower middle class, expansive. Kenny’s was UMCCM, as were Steve Wil. and Dana. I knew several Roman Catholic families that were LMCR. Scotty, who lived down the street and had a policeman for a dad was definitely WC.

From The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community, by Herbert J. Gans, 1967

MAJOR SUBCULTURES AMONG THE LEVITTOWNERS
Statistics do not provide a complete picture of the Levittowners and how they vary, and figures must be fleshed out by ethno­graphic description. Age and life-cycle position are important sources of diversity in American society, but most Levittowners are young couples. Given the declining influence on behavior of regional origin, religious preference, and ethnic background, the crucial source of variety in Levittown is class and class subculture.

Classes are strata-with-subcultures that grow out of the struc­ture of the national economy and society. By class subcultures I mean sets of responses that have developed out of people's efforts to cope with the opportunities, incentives, and rewards, as well as the deprivations, prohibitions, and pressures, which the natural environment and society offer to them.

From another perspective, subcultures are predispositions to behavior, ways of acting, to be followed when the social situation permits it. For example, the desire for community activity is a major source of differentiation between lower middle and upper middle class subcultures. People of the latter class are more pre­disposed to routine involvement in civic ventures; those of the former participate only when there is a political threat to their homes and families or when occupational roles require it, as in the case of a lawyer or insurance salesman who must advertise his services through community activities in order to earn a living. The social situations with which people must cope and the roles they normally play are, of course, the most important determi­nants of behavior, but cultural predispositions help to explain why people act differently in the same social situation or role.

Finally, subcultures are aggregates of predispositions, so that where one is found (for example, civic activity), another (buy­ing gourmet foods or reading a magazine like Harper's) is also likely to be present. Predispositions are related or aggregated, sometimes into a fairly stable system, because the situations which people face and the responses they make are often similar, and it is these similarities which are estimated when class is measured by income, occupation, or education. At one time, occupation was an easy clue to the rest of a person's culture, but among the Levittowners education is probably the best index, for years of schooling and the quality of the school attended influence strongly the job for which a person is eligible, the amount of money he has to spend, the kind of woman he marries, and the way he and his family will spend their leisure hours.

The people who came to Levittown may be distinguished as "belonging" to three major class subcultures, which can be labeled as working class, lower middle class, and upper middle class. They must be described in very general terms, ignoring for the sake of clarity the many nuances and diversities which each individual, by virtue of his upbringing and experience, expresses in acting upon his own predispositions. At best, then, the de­scriptions that follow are brief profiles; at worst, they are only stereotypes."

Working Class
The way of life I call "working class subculture" is to be found not only among blue collar workers, but also among lower­ echelon white collar workers and among people who did not graduate from high school. In the white population, many are Catholics, and of Irish, Italian, and Southern or Eastern Euro­pean peasant backgrounds. The vestiges of this origin are espe­cially strong in family life. The typical working class family is sexually segregated. Husbands and wives exchange love and affec­tion, but they have separate family roles and engage in little of the companionship found in the middle classes. The husband is the breadwinner and the enforcer of child discipline; the wife is the housekeeper and rears the children. Whenever possible, hus­bands spend their free time with other male companions, women with other women. Entertaining is rarer than in the middle class, and most social life takes place among relatives and childhood friends. When they are not available, there is occasional visiting with neighbors and also a tendency for husband and wife to draw closer to each other. Even so, it is significant that the first organ­ization to be founded in Levittown was the Veterans of Foreign Wars, its predominantly working class membership quickly mak­ing it a suburban substitute for the city's neighborhood tavern.

Parent-child relationships are adult-centered. Children are ex­pected to behave according to adult rules and are often disci­plined when they act as children. Therefore, the young child is supervised strictly and his life is bounded by a large number of rules, deviation from which is punished affectionately but, by middle class standards, harshly. The main purpose of child­rearing is to make sure that the child stays out of trouble-that is, does not get into difficulties with the school or the police. For this reason, working class parents expect the school to enforce disci­pline. Children react to these parental demands by seeking to get out of the house at an early age and to give up the family for the peer group as soon as possible. For some years there is familial conflict over this move, but, generally speaking, working class parents give their children freedom sooner than middle class parents do. They often expect the child to get into trouble by the time he reaches adolescence, and accept its occurrence fatalis­tically. By then the child, especially the boy, is expected to be a near-adult and responsible for himself.

Socially mobile working class families attempt to prolong adult control, especially over school behavior. Since parents know that mobility can only be achieved by educational success, they put pressure on their children to do well in school. Not being well equipped to help the child, however, they can only continually urge him to work harder at his studies. Often, this kind of pressure is ineffective, and mobile families find to their disap­pointment that the child does poorly in school. In nonmobile families, children are expected to finish whatever schooling is necessary to obtain good-that is, secure and stable-jobs. By now high school graduation is considered desirable, and if a boy is academically successful, the parents will make an effort to send him to college. However, there are usually so many opposing peer group influences and other pressures that by the time the child reaches college age he is neither able nor willing to go on.

Working class culture provides few of the skills and attitudes needed for organizational activities. People find it extremely difficult to accept the validity of values and interests which con­flict with theirs; they have trouble relating to strangers and making decisions in a group-or for the group. Also, they tend to view political and other organizations with the same moral measuring stick as the family, and expect similarly altruistic be­havior from such, organizations. This produces a highly personalistic view of government and associations, and when their ac­tions are undesirable, they are seen as tools of unscrupulous indi­viduals out for personal gain. More generally, working class peo­ple believe-with some justification-that these agencies are es­tablished to benefit the business community and the middle class, and to deprive "working people" of their rightful share of goods and privileges. As a result, they are highly suspicious of private and governmental organizations and reject them when their aims do not accord with working class priorities. In a middle class community then, people of working class culture stay close to home and make the house a haven against a hostile outside world.

Lower Middle Class
Probably three quarters of the Levittowners follow the predis­position of lower middle class culture. They are some of the blue collar workers, the white collar ones, and even many of the pro­fessionals; they are people who have completed high school and perhaps a vocationally or a nonintellectually-oriented liberal arts college.

The lower middle class family is sexually less segregated than the working class one. Husbands and wives are closer to being companions, for both sexes have learned to share a few common interests and to participate to some extent in each other's world. Since neither man nor woman is likely to have an intense outside avocation, the home and the family are the focal point for mutuality. Partly because the common interest is in the home, the lower middle class family is child-centered. This character­istic must not be exaggerated, however, for the image so popular in the mass media-of impotent parents dominated by their de­manding children-is inaccurate, except perhaps among families from extremely poor beginnings, who want their children to have everything they missed and then cannot cope with their ceaseless requests. Most lower middle class families are child­centered only to the extent that the home is run for both adults and children, and the children are allowed to be themselves and to act as children. At the same time, they are raised strictly, for parents are fearful of spoiling them. Lower middle class parents play with their children much more than working class parents do. Partly for this reason, they do not relinquish control over their children so quickly. They believe in the value of school and church, but do not want these institutions to transform the child or to make demands that would alienate it from the home. The working class sees these institutions as keeping the child in line; the lower middle class wants them to support the home and its values.

In education the lower middle class prefers a modern approach without undue pressure on the child, with every child treated as an individual-but not as a unique or different one, as upper middle class parents favor. Social adjustment is as important as academic success: it is hoped that the children will be accepted by peers of equal status. Educational achievement is important; lower middle class parents want their children to go to college, because higher education is a prerequisite to a respectable and well-paid job and a good marriage.

One reason for the child-centeredness of the lower middle class family is that such a family type is nuclear-that is, consisting only of parents and children. In America, the clanlike extended family is highly valued only in the working class, in some ethnic groups of all classes, and for other reasons, in the upper class. Lower middle class people still love and visit their relatives, but if they are too far away to visit, they are not especially missed, for lower middle class people are able to make friends. Their social life is informal and involves primarily neighbors and friends met through organizational activities.

Many lower middle class people are also active in church and in voluntary associations. The church reinforces their view of the world as run by morality, in which goodness, kindness, honesty, and altruism are important motive forces to action, and evil is the result of evil impulses. Of course, the church is important also as a source of fellowship; here people can find friends with simi­lar viewpoints, and of similar class level as well, and without hav­ing to admit this aim as a motivation. Parents support such organizations as the PTA and the Scouts, which uphold the cultural values of orderliness, self-reliance, constructive leisure, and above all, the primacy of the home and its moral strictures. People also belong to purely adult associations, many still sex-­segregated, which combine sociability with community service. As in the case of the working class, the lower middle class nor­mally has little interest in government. The working class distrusts politicians because they are seen as enriching them­selves; the lower middle class is wary of politicians as dishonest and opportunistic. If government is immoral, the best solution is to keep its functions and power minimal; the ideal is a business­man or a city manager who will do away with politics and will also keep taxes low.

Today, the lower middle class must be divided into restrictive and expansive subgroups. The former includes most Protestants and those Catholics (especially of Irish origin) who have adopted the Calvinist-Puritan tradition of pre-twentieth century America. This tradition arose in the small towns of America, and its ad­herents still harbor considerable suspicion of the city and its peo­ple, but especially of the "action-seeking," adventurous working class and the urbane and cosmopolitan upper middle class. They try to lead sober and controlled lives, with little drinking or partying other than the ubiquitous card parties. Ostentation and gaudiness are shunned, as are excitement and sensuality, which may be enjoyed only vicariously in the mass media. The expan­sive group includes other Catholics, Jews, and those Protestants who share their European, non-Puritan origins, particularly those who have moved into the middle class from urban working class and ethnic origins. Members of the expansive subgroup buy more impulsively, enjoy an aggressively active social life, and are willing to drink, gamble, and enjoy openly the offerings of modern show business.

Lower middle class culture is often accused of being overly concerned with respectability and keeping up appearances. This is probably truer of the restrictive than of the expansive group, for the former is essentially attempting to maintain a past tradi­tion. Even so, there is more of a conflict between the ideal and the real in the lower middle class than in the working class. The latter has few pretensions about the world and expresses its idealism as cynicism; working class people have suffered too much from reality to believe that things could be much different. Lower middle class people, however, still defend a preindustrial moral code which sometimes requires the hypocrisy that has been noted in contemporary lower middle class life.

Upper Middle Class

A small proportion of managers and professionals have found their way to Levittown, at least temporarily, and although many are not yet upper middle class in income or status, they will be in years to come. Theirs is already the culture of the college-­educated, cosmopolitan population, trained to be interested in and to participate in the larger world. Home and family are somewhat less important to this than to the other classes. The upper middle class family has shed almost all sexual segregation, for college attendance has trained women for organizational and occupational skills which they can and want to pursue even while being mothers and housewives. The wife still does the house­work-though she is likely to have domestic help to release her for other activities-but many of the child-rearing functions may be shared with the husband. Interests other than those of the home can also be shared by the spouses and, conversely, each can have interests that take them away from the home. One-but not the only one-of the shared interests is the children. The upper middle class is concerned with the development of the child as a unique individual, one who can perform autonomously in all spheres of life valued by the upper middle class, especially a re­warding professional career. In order to achieve these aims, parents provide direction for the lives of their children, so that while family life is child-centered, it is also adult-directed. The children are encouraged and even pressured to do well in school and parents are concerned that the school their children attend not only provide a good education but also demand a high level of performance.°

Since most upper middle class people (at least in Levittown) have achieved their present position by their own individual achievement, the relationship with the extended family is even more tenuous than in the lower middle class. Upper middle class people are good at making friends, and choose them on the basis of shared interests. There is a considerable amount of social life, although the parties and entertaining may be devoted as much to shop talk and civic affairs as to the gossip and small talk that con­stitute the staple of social conversation among other groups.

Upper middle class people participate not only in voluntary associations but in the entire community. As cosmopolitans, they want to shape the community by national values which may not respect local traditions."' For example, they are less interested in having the school system be superior to that of nearby commu­nities than in making sure that foreign languages are taught in the elementary grades. For this population, community participation is almost a cultural duty. Although upper middle class people are as distrustful of politicians as others, they have both the skills and the status to become involved in government and to fight for what they think is desirable. Needing the community's public institutions to provide cosmopolitan educational and cul­tural services that cannot be made available at home, they favor a high level of public expenditure, to be parceled out by well­educated, nonpartisan political leaders of their own class.

Upper middle class culture can also be divided into two groups which might be called conservative-managerial and lib­eral-professional. The former is often thought of as "the business community," and its people are likely to be politically and cul­turally conservative. The latter are frequently Jewish, and politi­cally and culturally liberal, and are employed in the community ­centered professions such as education and social work. In some ways, the distinction between the two groups is similar to the re­strictive and expansive distinction in the lower middle class. The conservative-managerial upper middle class has also come from Protestant origins, although its behavior is less restrictive. The liberal-professional upper middle class is unusually active in the community. Aside from its personal interest in good schools-a characteristic it shares with the managerial group-it also fights for well-known liberal causes such as better race relations, com­munity planning, mental health, and the United Nations. In­deed, it is much more cosmopolitan than the managerial group, more sensitive to "ideas" in the abstract and to national issues than the latter. The managerial group may often oppose the pro­fessional group here, for the former, being allied with business, favors low taxes and opposes the liberalism that is inherent in the cosmopolitan stance. Liberal-professionals are the main audience for high culture. They go to concerts, plays, and museums in the big cities; they organize lectures, art exhibitions, and visits from famous performers in the suburbs. The managerial group is more likely to put its energies into golf and the country club which the liberal-professionals shun.