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By Root 7756 0

Enquirer, and a founder of the Century Association, addressed such issues in The Moral Significance of the Crystal Palace (1853) and other widely touted tracts. Bellows had no brief for the mere pursuit of money, and he blasted aristocratic foppery. He insisted, on the other hand, that the enterprise of self-interested Christian businessmen had brought wealth and progress to the republic, that the desire for material goods would promote hard work among the poor, and that possessing goods was as morally beneficial as pursuing them. Poverty, to his way of thinking, had nothing to recommend it.

Even Nathaniel Parker Willis agreed that a proper aristocracy had to rest on more than wealth and fashion. He reminded readers that refinement was the true hallmark of respectability, and he called for creation of “a class whose opinion is entitled to undeniable weight—a class whose judgement is made up from elevated standards.” Without the authority conferred by refinement, no local elite would be ever be able to provide a “breakwater” to the dangers posed by the “ignorant and vicious classes.”

Nevertheless, many of the city’s haute bourgeoisie found it uncomfortably hard to reconcile upperten lifestyles with their still-cherished beliefs in political equality (for white men), equality of opportunity, the fairness of market relationships, the possibility of social mobility, and the purported insignificance of class divisions in republican America.

Uppertendom seemed even more problematic to the petite bourgeoisie, newly enlarged and newly self-conscious, which the boom had summoned into being. New York’s middling strata would split on the luxury issue, some opting for fierce republican disapproval, others for fawning emulation. Most, however, sought to carve out a position that, while drawing the line at aristocratic frippery, nevertheless sought to find some common ground with the city’s most powerful people, ground they discerned in the theory and practice of “respectability.”

THE RESPECTABLE CLASSES

A state census completed in 1855 fixed the population of New York City at just under 630,000 people, about 215,000 of whom were gainfully employed. Perhaps 30 percent of these were members of a many-layered middle class, though the 30 percent figure varies markedly depending on which social clusters get classified as middle class, something on which observers did not (and still don’t) agree.

Nearly everyone placed professionals in the middle class—after setting aside those few whose wealth and connections placed them in uppertendom. This group included traditional practitioners like doctors, lawyers, clergy, and teachers, and newcomers like the members of the American Society of Civil Engineers (1852) and the American Institute of Architects (1857). Lesser merchants, along with small independent businessmen, were usually considered another middle-class contingent: clothiers, grocers, barbers, druggists, shopkeepers, restaurateurs, undertakers, and dealers in commodities as varied as books, cattle, oysters, coal, or stone.

Clerical workers, though employees, were generally but not always accorded (lower) middle status. Some of these—bank tellers, accountants, bookkeepers, cashiers, and copyists like Bartleby—handled the surging paperwork in the city’s (by 1856) seventy-five banks, ninety insurance companies, and brokerage houses (130 on Wall and William streets alone). Another set acted as management assistants, staffing the headquarters of railroad, shipping, publishing, mining, or manufacturing companies. Thus the Novelty Iron Works had eighteen departments, and each was headed by a foreman who reported to a “front office” presided over by a superintendent and eleven clerks. A third complement served in the great retail establishments and thus included the two hundred clerks and salespeople who worked the floors at Brooks’ Brothers Broadway emporium. Taken together, the nearly fourteen thousand clerical workers constituted New York City’s third largest workforce category after servants and laborers.

It proved hardest of all to