America has always been a nation of middle class people, even back in colonial times. The exception was the southern slave economy, which didn't have much of a middle class.
it's a pretty big exception, even if the other part is true. (And thanks for acknowledging the exception up front!)
At the high points, 20% of the total U.S. population were enslaved. At that point, it's not just an exception, it's a problem with the entire premise, even if the entire rest of the population was 'middle class', which they weren't.
What allowed the U.S. economy to function with an unusually large portion of _white_ people being "middle class" (compared to Europe)... was all the African people who weren't. There's no reason to treat those 20% of people as not part of the U.S. economy, they were a _crucial_ part. If we were to look at what portion of the _entire_ population of the U.S. was "middle class", including those 20% enslaved people, for whatever definition of 'middle class', that'd be closer anyway. There's no reason to look at things without them though, as if they were just a footnote. 20% of the population!
It's 20% of the population of the entire country. It was probably much more than 20% in the South, indeed (in some states as high as _65%_ enslaved people at some times!), and less in the North. The North did originally have some enslaved people.
The severing of the economies at the outset of the Civil War, and the total destruction of the southern economy during the war, yet the continued prosperity of the northern economy shows that the northern economy was not dependent on slaves.
> The North did originally have some enslaved people.
Yes, and the ending of that did not retard the economy or reduce the middle class in any detectable way. The middle class increased throughout the 19th century.
Slavery was integral to the entire U.S. economy, but that economy was changing in the mid-19th century, and indeed it's not totally false that those economic changes were part of what led to the civil war.
// Capitalists in the North profited by investing in banks that handled the exchange of money for people, or in insurance companies that provided insurance for the owners’ investments in enslaved people. So did foreign investors in Southern securities, some of which were issued on mortgaged slaves. The hotbed of American abolitionism — New England — was also the home of America’s cotton textile industry, which grew rich on the backs of the enslaved people forced to pick cotton. The story of America’s domestic slave trade is not just a story about Richmond or New Orleans, but about America. //
"“In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery—as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers—proved indispensable to national economic development,” Beckert and Rockman write in the introduction to the book. “… Cotton offered a reason for entrepreneurs and inventors to build manufactories in such places as Lowell, Pawtucket, and Paterson, thereby connecting New England’s Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier of the Deep South. And financing cotton growing, as well as marketing and transporting the crop, was a source of great wealth for the nation’s merchants and banks.”"
Not sure where your drawing your data from the US does have a large working class population and always has had.
Up in the hollers you can still find some very poor working class people and its noticeable that the forces recruit from these populations (this is from conversations with USAF personnel)
So the original proposition was that "America has always been a nation of middle class people, even back in colonial times."
I'm not sure exactly what they meant. i'm not sure if "middle class people" and "working class people" are the same thing. I'm not sure if a "large working class population" contradicts "a nation of middle class people."
I interpreted the original claim as suggesting that the U.S. had _more_ "middle class people" than European nations, and had much much fewer people who were not "middle class people" compared to contemporaneous European (or other) nations. I am not sure how we define "middle class" or compare the U.S. and Europe "even in colonial times". I am sure that enslaved people were not "middle class" though.
But where I found my data that at some points ("colonial times " and shortly after) up to 20% of the entire U.S. population was enslaved people (who were obviously not "middle class" and to me present some serious problems with considering the U.S. at those times "a nation of middle-class people") by googling, and finding this: https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm
The last line is total U.S. population. We can see that in 1750, 934,340 (white) + 236,420 (black) = 1,170,760. 236,420 / 1,170,760 == 20.1%. "colonial times". 1790, specifically breaking out free vs enslaved Black people now, also roughly 20% of the total population was enslaved people. The percentage starts to go down after that, by 1860 down to "only" 12%, which is still enough people who are clearly not middle class that I'm not sure I'd want to call it a "nation of middle-class people".
Talking about a "US economy" in the antebellum years is like talking about a "European economy" today. There were vast economic and social differences between North and South because they followed fundamentally different economic models.
It's shrinking by your definition, growing by others (the poor of today are the middle class of history if you look at poverty levels, purchasing power, or class mobility).
Further, we are in a noticeable amount of ways not a free market. If I took my car engine (the free market) to a mechanic and said "It's not working after I just made a couple of random small changes to it", the mechanic would rightfully laugh me out the door because me just meddling with a complex system, even if its only a small amount, can have disastrous side effects.
