American Social Classes in the 1950s: Selections from Vance Packard's The Status Seekers (Bedford Series in History & Culture) [Paperback]

Vance Packard (Author), Daniel Horowitz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312111800 | ISBN-13: 978-0312111809 | Publication Date: January 15, 1995 | Edition: First Edition

This abridged edition of Vance Packard's 1959 The Status Seekers presents a picture of American society in the late 1950s that allows students to develop a more accurate and complex understanding of an often-caricatured era. Daniel Horowitz's introduction provides historical context, an assssment of the book's impact, and a discussion of its critical reception.

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About the Author

Daniel Horowitz is professor of American studies and history at Smith College. His scholarly work focuses on the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the United States. He is the author of The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940, which was selected by Choice Magazine as one of the outstanding academic books of 1984. His most recent book, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (1994), examines the life and impact of one of the nation's most widely read nonfiction writers of the postwar period.

Product Details

• Paperback: 215 pages
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's; First Edition edition (January 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312111800
• ISBN-13: 978-0312111809
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #67,220 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent study, and a time capsule in itself., April 12, 2002

By 

Christopher W. Chase "Christopher W. Chase" (East Lansing, MI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: American Social Classes in the 1950s: Selections from Vance Packard's The Status Seekers (Bedford Series in History & Culture) (Paperback)

Vance Packard's "The Status Seekers" is a well known compendium and analysis of the nature and development of social classification during the 1950's-a period marked by explosive growth of the U.S. economy, especially among young white families. The thesis of the book, as explained by Packard, is that rather than the creation of a largely classless society in which "all" were gaining the benefits of democratic capitalism, the creation of an "affluent" society simply highlighted and created new stratifications, both horizontal, and vertical, of social class based on race, religion, behavioral and consumptive practices.

Packard sought to demonstrate his thesis by compiling and synthesizing then current sociological studies, as well as conducting informal interviews among members of various economic classes, policy experts, and professionals in different cities, towns, and states. There is little in the book that represents original thought, but the form, promotion and style of the book made it a best-selling nonfiction work among the general public.

It was precisely these qualities that drew so much ire from many critics, especially those drawn from the circles of New York intelligentsia-it was often attacked for its own pretense to provinciality and romanticism of an agrarian, frontier past. The Status Seekers nonetheless stands as a significant work in American Studies, precisely because of its ability to bring scholarly information, especially regarding the vertical stratifications of race and religion, to bear on the nature of class in America, and stands out as a dissenting voice in the consensus ideology and politics of containment that ruled public discourse at the time. Other criticisms of the book, such as the charge that it portrayed status seeking voyeuristically and hypocritically--- insofar as buyers used it to advance their own status---- are charges more appropriate to the willingness of the buying public to commodify and use as a tool any weapon in the fight to gain greater status. While books are meant to be read, conveying information about such timely topics is bound to get caught up in the politics of the very phenomenon studied. That is not Packard's fault.

There are other criticisms, more from a contemporary standpoint, that could be made of Packard's work. It is true that he took from conservative liberalism a predisposition to see affluence as the problem, rather than the lack of it for so many people within the society he studied. It is also true that he played more to the prejudices of the day, especially regarding race and gender, and failed to aggressively question some of the roots of the problems he sought in terms of these prejudices. But the point of his text was not to make a critique of American institutions as such, but rather the interpretations of those institutions as held and manipulated by consumers for their own benefit.

On the one hand, we should chalk this up to Packard's Cold War liberalism. Moreover, as pointed out in the excellent introductory essay by Daniel Horowitz, Packard was once a socialist radical, but experienced the realpolitik of Stalin's Soviet Union negotiations with Hitler, and correctly understood the USSR as a form of state capitalism (much like C. L. R. James). It would be worst sort of ex post facto presentism to hold these sorts of criticisms too hard against Packard.

Christopher W. Chase - PhD Fellow - Michigan State University