III.1. The Democratic Cut of Public Life in America

Not only the position of the American worker towards the world of goods — his material standard of living — is so much more favourable than that of his European comrades: his relations to men, to the institutions of society, his position in society and towards society, in short what I call his social position, also differ to his advantage from European conditions. “Liberty” and “equality” (not only in the formal-political but also in the material-social sense) are for him not empty notions, vague dreams, as for the proletariat in Europe, but in good part realities. His socially better social situation is, as it were, the resultant of his political position and his economic situation: of a radical-democratic constitution and a prosperous standard of living, both in the midst of a colonial population without history, which at bottom consisted, and consists, entirely of “immigrants”, among whom the traditions of feudalism (with the exception of some southern slave states) are lacking.

Unfortunately this peculiarity of the social position of the worker cannot be determined as exactly — be it with the help of the paragraphs of a law, be it with the help of figures — as that of his political or economic situation. The demonstration must rest in part on sentiment, must content itself with the appraisal of symptoms, must not underrate small things, and will nevertheless remain incomplete as a whole. Then the general impression, the seeing, must replace what exact demonstration has not been able to achieve.

Whoever has ever observed American workers, men or women, in their manner of life outside the factory or the workshop even fleetingly, has noticed at the first glance that one is dealing with a different breed from ours. We have seen already how smartly and often elegantly dressed the workers, and especially the working women, go their way to the place of work. In the street they are “citizens”, to judge by their appearance: working gentlemen and working ladies. Outwardly the stigma of a separate class, which almost all European workers bear about them, is lacking. In bearing too, in look, in manner of conversation, the American worker stands out sharply from the European. He carries his head high, walks with an elastic step, and is as free and cheerful in his expression as any bourgeois. The cowed, the submissive is lacking in him. He associates with everyone really — not only in theory — as with “his equals”. The trade-union leader who takes part in a festive banquet moves just as surely on the parquet as any Excellency in Germany. But he also wears a dress-coat that fits brilliantly, patent-leather boots, elegant linen in the latest fashion, so that outwardly too no one can distinguish him from the President of the Republic.

The fawning and cringing before the “higher classes” that touches one so unpleasantly in Europe is utterly unknown. It will occur to no waiter, no tram conductor, no policeman to adjust his behaviour differently when he has an “ordinary worker” before him than when he has the Governor of Pennsylvania. That means for the one who behaves so, as for the one to whom the behaviour is addressed, when he belongs to the poorer population, likewise a stiffening of the spine.

The whole of public life bears a more democratic cut. The worker is not reminded at every step and turn that he belongs to a “lower” class. Characteristic of this is the single class of carriage on all railways (which is only lately beginning to be divided by the Pullman cars).

Class conceit too is surely less widespread in the United States than, notably, with us. But because it is not what one is, still less what one’s parents were, that decides the valuation of the individual, but what one achieves, it suggests itself to make “work” in its abstract form, as “work” pure and simple, into a title of honour, and so also to meet the “worker” with respect, “although”, or rather because, he is only a worker. He naturally feels different in consequence from his colleague in a country where the human being, if not at the baron, then at the reserve officer, the doctor, the assessor, only really begins. The socially smaller distance between the individual strata of the population — in fact smaller as a consequence of the democratic constitution, of general education, of the higher standard of living of the worker — is thus made still smaller in the consciousness of the various classes by the customs and views described than it is in reality.