Document Type

Article

Publication Title

University of Pennsylvania Law Review

Abstract

My project is directed toward both of the scholarly lacunae I have identified. My aim is to shed light both on middle-classness and the roles of law and the state in defining, maintaining, and validating it. At numerous points in modern American history, actors within the legal system have been required by their programmatic interests to develop a working understanding of middle-classness. Much of the state's exercise of police power involved (and still involves) the setting of enforceable behavioral standards aimed at making public life safe for the "respectable" people in society, with respectability modeled on the behavior of the white, native-born middle strata. Prohibition, first at the state and then at the federal level, was just one manifestation of this broader trend. On the federal level, the World War I draft presented an important occasion for Progressive-era social reformers to envision middle-classness and protect it from the mixing of the classes in the military. Indeed, it seems at times as if middle-classness simply became "American-ness"-with the government simultaneously helping to define a middle-class set of values and standard of living, to encourage immigrants to embrace it, and to protect people who had done so from the bad influence of those who had not.

First Page

2019

DOI

https://doi.org/10.2307/3313024

Volume

151

Publication Date

2003

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