On the Other Bostonians

I really like Stephan Thernstrom’s work. As a good historian who mostly stays in his discipline, sociological methods tend to be really off-putting for me—they seem like some sort of pseudoscience that I can’t make heads or tails of (sorry sociologist buddies!). Yet, Thernstrom really shows me the importance of sociology and quantitative methods in doing history.

In many ways, this is a sequel to Poverty and Progress. While Poverty and Progress looks exclusively at Newburyport in the mid-late nineteenth century, The Other Bostonians looks at nearly a century of social life in Boston and compares it to other American cities—an ambitious task indeed. Instead of relying on the normal sources used by historians—diaries, newspapers, speeches, minutes for meetings, etc.—he examines demographic data, censuses (censes?), marriage certificates, and the like.

Some of the arguments that he makes are really interesting. The first that stood out to me is that he walks back many of his claims in Poverty and Progress. In that book, he argued that Newburyport was a representative American city in terms of class mobility but, after examining Boston and some other cities, he actually finds that Newburyport was exceptional. Newburyport saw little social mobility and, while social mobility throughout the rest of the country wasn’t particularly fluid, it was much better than the case of Newburyport.

Second, he finds that any given worker had around a 10% chance of moving from blue collar to white collar work at some point in their life. This is broadly true of the entire period under study and much of the country. The children of blue collar workers had a slightly higher chance of going into white collar work, around 15%. However, the real point of social mobility was in moving in the shades between social classes. 30-40% of children of blue collar workers found occupational positions as clerks, small shopkeepers, and the like. These aren’t high managerial roles or important positions for finance, but socially they’re much better than manual labor. In contrast, only around 3-4% of white collar workers “fell” to laboring positions. As a result, in the period under study, Americans were much more likely to rise in social class than to fall (I imagine their occupations were then filled in by the “new” lower class, largely immigrant until the 1920s-30s).

To Thernstrom, Boston is not an exceptional city, but it is not a microcosm of America either. It has shades of difference, especially due to the wide gulf that existed between the Brahmins and the city’s enormous population of Irish immigrants, but it had many more commonalities with American cities (including smaller cities like Poughkeepsie and western cities like Los Angeles).

This is a really good piece of scholarship, and it helped me to think much more about social class in America.