The post-World War II period also saw tremendous advances in civil rights. Color bars-restrictions on employment by race-were severely reduced. In the 1930's, Ford was the only Detroit automaker that would employ America's Blacks, and even Ford restricted them to a few types and locations of jobs. Marriage bars-policies that women should be fired upon marriage or upon pregnancy-were also reduced. Equality of opportunity no matter what your race or sex at least became an avowed goal. In southern rural school systems before the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka desegregation decision, the school year for Blacks typically had only one-third as many classroom hours as the school year for whites. Even though opportunities by the 1970's still depended heavily on class and race, opportunities for upward mobility were significantly enhanced by public educational systems, public colleges, and a federal government formally unwilling to allow your right to hire, serve, or sell to whomever you chose to extended to classifications based on race.

The end of formal and official racism in American society is an enormous accomplishment, and a battle that looks likely to remain won. Right wing voices complaining that federal curbs on the freedom to discriminate damaged federalism, infringed on privacy, or threatened to create economic stagnation grew weaker as time passed. And right wing complaints against equality of opportunity-that such an "ideal" deserved nothing but scorn: "a world turned upside-down indeed!…[T]he very idea of such a society is inherently absurd" because upward mobility on the part of the children of the poor required downward mobility on the part of the children of the rich-were greatly at odds with the consensus belief about the true nature of America. For example, Abraham Lincoln said on the eve of the Civil War:

…Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us. Twenty five years ago, I was a hired laborer. The hired laborer of yesterday, labors on his own account today; and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow. Advancement-improvement in condition-is the order of things in a society of equals…

Lincoln's free soil answer was that Blacks in the South were indeed enslaved to the Lords of the Lash, but that workers in the North were not enslaved to the Lords of the Loom, but had their own "capital" in the forms of property, tools, or skills. Their property, tools, and skills made them-even though they did not own or boss anyone-much more proprietors of their own capabilities than subjects of some lump of capital: they could always leave one employment and sell their valuable skills elsewhere. Free upward mobility-both absolute and relative-if you worked hard was the central promise of America.

The argument that America is a middle-class society, not a society of workers and capitalists, recurs throughout American history. Around 1900 German sociologists had a furious debate on why the United States had no socialist party; in the 1920's, AT&T ran advertisements showing a housewife in an apron peeling potatoes, with the caption "one of the owners of the Bell System." There is a great deal of truth in this "American ideology." But it is more true today, when college professors earn, on average, a little less than twice the average wage, then it was back in 1900 when college professors earned perhaps six times the average wage.

Class and Status in America

The levelling of the income distribution had important social consequences in the United States. It was the driving force behind a severe reduction in class distinctions. In 1900, the largest gap in social status and class was between the rich on the one hand, and the middle class and poor on the other. By the post-World War II era this had changed. America had become a "middle class society"-meaning that the major gulf lay between the poor and the rest, middle class and rich.

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