What has happened to the Lynds working class distinction?
THEODORE CAPLOW: Well, you begin to have problems of classification, of course, because in 1924 the distinction was clean. People working with tools and materials were mainly employed in big factories, and a few of them in artisan shops. And the people who worked with symbols and ideas were all employed in offices, a few perhaps in retail stores. So that was easy to do. It’s much harder to do with current occupations. That is, whether a computer repairman should be called white collar or blue collar is a challenging question. But the notion that the working class has disappeared is absurd. For the country as a whole, people currently classify it as blue collar. In 1995, by one careful estimate, 48 percent of the male labor force was blue collar. There’s been a great erosion and that’s very important. But no one would conceivably describe them, as the Lynds did in 1924, as two separate tribes. There’s been a great erosion of the cultural differences, accomplished by the universalization
