-Caveat Lector- from: New York History Vol.XLVII No.3 July 1966 New York State Historical Association©1966 Cooperstown, New York ----- The Social Structure of Revolutionary America. By Jackson T. Mam. (Princeton, N. J. Princeton University Press, 1965. Pp. viii, 330, $6.50) Jackson Turner Main's The Social Structure of Revolutionary America is the latest and most comprehensive attempt to utilize the norms of modern sociological and economic analysis in an interpretation of the revolutionary period. This is a novel study, which is both an outline for future research and a challenge to historians concerned with the meaning of the American Revolution. Its broad sweep takes in North and South, social orders, living styles, horizontal and vertical mobility, and the meaning of "class." Main holds that America for the period 1763-1788 was a fluid, flexible, mobile, achieving society, inhabited by a people of plenty. Class consciousness, if that means that men were "aware of a hierarchical structure and of their own rank within it," hardly existed at all. However, almost three hundred pages of probate and tax research show that class as "a rank order within which an individual can move up or down without any insurmountable difficulty" did exist in this era. The first part of this book is a detailed study of the economic class structures in the North and South. For the North, Main posits four regional types. First was the frontier community, marked by high mobility and the concentration of a third of its land in the hands of the top 10% of the farmers. An even greater diffusion of land ownership existed in the subsistence farm areas, although land there had little market value. This was in sharp contrast to the commercial farm communities, with their fertile soil and access to markets, in which the top 10% of the farmers owned half the land. Finally, there were the urban societies in which the top group controlled 600% of the wealth. The South differed from the North in that it was more rural. There the great commercial farms marked the land as did the slave system. Both North and South shared a lower class of rural and urban white laborers who constituted about a fifth of the population. However, over half of all the whites formed a middle class of farmers, artisans, and other small property owners. The large farmers, professional men, and shopkeepers formed an upper middle class. Finally an upper class existed, made up of the merchants, lawyers, and major landowners. A characteristic of all of these groups was mobility. However, it was the city, not the countryside that offered the greatest possibility of success. Main's figures show that close to 70% of the New York and Boston merchants in 1790 were self-made men. Many of these conclusions, as the author admits, are to be found in one form or another in the studies of Bailyn, Bridenbaugh, Jensen, Grant, and Crevecoeur. What Main has done is to categorize the social scene and then present a synthetic view of the "Good Society." Main concludes his important study by affirming that the "Revolution made great changes." One would expect that a book dealing with the social structure of Revolutionary America would have something to say about those changes. In point of fact this 1763-1788 era is treated as a time sequence. Could not the findings of this study be equally valid for the years 1748 to 1763? Actually Main, far from showing revolutionary change, argues for a conservative interpretation. This revolutionary society, with its openness, its mobility its social and economic fluidity (blacks excluded), was certainly' not agitated by malcontents who sought to right social or economic injustice. The modern historian is thus faced with the puzzling prospect of reemphasizing ideologi-cal considerations. Perhaps only by returning to the thought content of the revolutionary generation c - an the significance of the Revolution be understood. JOHN J. WATERS University of Rochestcer pps. 315-317 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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