under conditions not so different from a century ago, and often in the same
locations.
These books’ poor treatment of labor history is magnificent compared to
their treatment of social class. Nothing that textbooks discuss—not even
strikes—is ever anchored in any analysis of social class.^6 This amounts to
delivering the footnotes instead of the lecture! Half of the eighteen high school
American history textbooks I examined contain no index listing at all for social
class, social stratification, class structure, income distribution, inequality,
or any conceivably related topic. Not one book lists upper class or lower
class. Three list middle class, but only to assure students that America is a
middle-class country. “Except for slaves, most of the colonists were members
of the ‘middling ranks,’ ” says Land of Promise, and nails home the point that
we are a middle-class country by asking students to “describe three ‘middle-
class’ values that united free Americans of all classes.” Several of the
textbooks note the explosion of middle-class suburbs after World War II.
Talking about the middle class is hardly equivalent to discussing social
stratification, however. On the contrary, as Gregory Mantsios has pointed out,
“such references appear to be acceptable precisely because they mute class
differences.”^7
Stressing how middle-class we all are is increasingly problematic today,
because the proportion of households earning between 75 percent and 125
percent of the median income has fallen steadily since 1967. The Reagan-Bush
administrations accelerated this shrinkage of the middle class, and most
families who left its ranks fell rather than rose.^8 As late as 1970, family
incomes in the United States were only slightly less equal than in Canada. By
2000, inequality here was much greater than Canada’s; the United States was
becoming more like Mexico, a very stratified society.^9 The Bush II
administration, with its tax cuts aimed openly at the wealthy, continued to
increase the gap between the haves and have-nots. This is the kind of historical
trend one would think history books would take as appropriate subject matter,
but only five of the eighteen books in my sample provide any analysis of social
stratification in the United States. Even these fragmentary analyses are set
mostly in colonial America. Boorstin and Kelley, unusual in actually including
social class in its index, lists only social classes in 1790 and social classes in
early America. These turn out to be two references to the same paragraph,
which tells us that England “was a land of rigid social classes,” while here in