Social Status in the City by Bernice Neugarten

Author:Bernice Neugarten [Neugarten, Bernice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Urban
ISBN: 9781351489515
Google: TCRBDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 37489284
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lower-Middle-Elite

Seventeen per cent of lower-middle families occupied a position of superior status within the class because of their jobs or their income level. The average lower-middle person deferred to schoolteachers and to ministers, for example, as men and women of superior education who performed a more valued service than he did. He also respected the moderately prospering independent enter-prisers and the higher-income, semi-managerial families who lived in the above average houses which lined the leading boulevards or occupied corner lots in his neighborhood.

The professional and higher income families were expected to provide leadership for the rest of the lower-middle class in the churches, PTAs, fraternal lodges, and American Legion posts. Whether or not they actually exercised such leadership, the men and women of elite status were regarded as the most competent people in the lower-middle class.

Kansas Citians had a name, The Benton Boulevard Crowd, for one type of lower-middle-elite who lived along the street that earlier had been a center of the upper-middle class. The Benton Boulevard people, who were looked down upon by contemporary upper-middles as “behind the times” or “just sort of corny” people, in turn made fun of “the Country Club crowd.” They ridiculed its “pretensions” and took pride in their own lack of them. One of the most effective spokesmen for the Benton Boulevard ethic was a school administrator:

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