Though American colonists threw off Britain’s rule in the Revolutionary War (1775-83), George Washington, the first President of the United States, and his wife were held by some critics to mimic the style of British nobility. How would you assess the presentation of class status (and gender dynamics) in Edward Savage’s portrait, The Washington Family (1787-96)?
‘Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us’ (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Scribner, 2004 [1925], p. 50). Explore the representation and the significance of servants in the American culture you have studied.
‘Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an item for aesthetic appreciation’ (Susan Sontag, On Photography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, p. 98). Take a selection of photographs of the American poor – by the likes of Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Chris Arnade, etc. – and respond to Sontag’s assertion.
‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, Marx/Engels: Selected Works, Vol. 1, Progress Publishers, 1969, p. 14). Test this proposition in a reading of American cultural material you have encountered recently (a film or novel, perhaps).
‘Now testify / It’s right outside your door, now testify’ (Rage Against the Machine, ‘Testify’, Epic Records, 1999). How powerfully does the American culture you have studied testify against class injustice and inequality?
Mark Fisher evokes ‘the failure of the future’ (Capitalist Realism, Zer0 Books, 2009, p. 7). But perhaps this is too pessimistic? What do class relations look like in American cultural texts that try to imagine the future?
Study Activities
Read the first sections of two important American novels which were published almost synchronously, and which share a sensitivity to markers of class inequality: Chapter 1 of Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920) and Chapters 1-3 of Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922: by a nice coincidence Babbitt is dedicated to Wharton). Compare each novel’s presentation of class dynamics (of gender dynamics, too). It will be helpful to think about matters such as narrative voice, focalisation (i.e. perspective) and choices in lexis and imagery.
Only one of the series of photographs that Dorothea Lange took of Florence Owens Thompson in California in 1936, at the height of the Depression, is widely known. This is the iconic image usually referred to as Migrant Mother. But the other photographs, adopting different distances and perspectives, also merit attention. Study the series, which you can find here on the Library of Congress website, and compare and contrast each image as a response to poverty. The titles of the photographs, as well as the visual contents themselves, are suggestive.
Assess as responses to class injustice the following quartet of songs, which derive from different periods and genres: a) Woody Guthrie, ‘I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore’ (1940); b) Bob Dylan, ‘Maggie’s Farm’ (1965); c) Eminem, ‘If I Had’ (1999); d) Childish Gambino, ‘This Is America’ (2018). How powerful are their interventions? Be sure to consider the part played in each track by vocal texture and musical layering, as well as by the lyrics themselves.
Watch some or all of the following films, which, in differing times and modes, reflect on the distorting effects upon American society of unevenly distributed money: a) American Madness (dir. Frank Capra, 1932); b) Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941); c) Wall Street (dir. Oliver Stone, 1987); d) American Psycho (dir. Mary Harron, 2000); e) The Great Gatsby (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2013); f) The Bling Ring (dir. Sofia Coppola, 2013). To what extent are these films, despite their avowed satirical or critical intent, in love with the super-rich? How effectively do they protect themselves from the blandishments of wealth?
Visit the website of Occupy, the movement for economic and social justice inaugurated by the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. Assess the part played in its campaigning by cultural forms of various sorts: e.g. polemical text, street art, photography, music video, documentary film and visual caricature (in one image, produced in 2025, Donald Trump sits scowling on a toilet, American flags to either side and a crown on his head). How effective are these various instruments, and how do they work alongside the traditional, gritty stuff of political action (marches, demos, foot-soldier organising at community level, etc.)?
Online Resources
Beyond Liberty: Class Divisions in the American Revolution – administered by the Revolutionary War Journal: features an engaging, illustrated essay by Nathaniel Parry, together with links to other relevant pieces on, say, ‘Understanding Colonial American Money’ and ‘Founding Fathers: America’s First One Percent’
‘A Slaveholder’s View of “Poor White Trash”’ – extract from Alabama lawyer Daniel R. Hundley’s book, Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860): fascinating for its white-on-white contempt, with Hundley calling impoverished Southern whites ‘the laziest two-clogged animals that walk erect on the face of the Earth’
America’s Gilded Age: Robber Barons and Captains of Industry – very useful portal administered by Maryville University, St. Louis and giving access to many resources on this set of capitalist potentates late in the nineteenth century, early in the twentieth
Jacob Riis – maintained by the International Center of Photography: substantial archive of photographs by Riis, whose documentation of New York’s poor in the 1890s is discussed in the chapter
Marxist Periodicals in the US – wonderful resource, opening up to readers the complete runs of a host of leftist journals in the United States (alphabetically from The Agitator founded in 1910 to The Young Worker founded in 1922)
Woody Guthrie – lovingly maintained website for this laureate of the poor and displaced during the Depression: includes, as well as the complete lyrics of Guthrie’s folk songs, his less well-known artwork
Resources on Social Class – handy portal managed by George Washington University, Washington, D.C. and offering resources on social stratification in America, including the entire text of bell hooks’s study, Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000)
Class differences – maintained by the American Psychological Association and interesting for its adopting a psychological rather than sociological approach to class hierarchy
Income, Wealth, & Poverty – valuable, up-to-the minute reports by the Pew Research Center on income distribution in the US: a source of statistical backing for the cultural responses to class in America that we discuss in the chapter
Winchester, Virginia – website of the local council for this economically challenged community which Joe Bageant writes about in his book, Deer Hunting with Jesus (discussed in the chapter): includes a timeline of town history from 1744 to 2012
Chris Arnade Walks the World – Arnade’s Substack newsletter, featuring reflections on and photographs of his recent travel: complements well our chapter’s coverage of Dignity (2019), the photojournalistic text that Arnade produced to bring to visibility the people living in ‘back row America’
