Thanksgiving Day 1860 - Two Great Classes of Society

Click on the image above to see Winslow Homer’s cover for Harper’s Weekly for December 1, 1860.

According to the New York Times, in the left panel, “two overdressed, supercilious socialites peer through opera glasses from an ornate theater box.” In the right panel, “a boy scampers home to his widowed mother and invalid sister clutching a loaf of bread, possibly ill-gotten.”

The New York Times article describes what was going on around Thanksgiving, 1860:

As national disunion loomed that Thanksgiving, so did hunger and misery for many Americans. Still rickety from the depression of 1857, the stock market had begun to collapse almost immediately after Abraham Lincoln’s election; Wall Street worried that debts owed by Southern planters – many of them mortgaged up to their eyebrows – would become uncollectable. Northern textile mills, fearing a disruption in cotton shipments from the South, began laying off workers by the thousands.

I think we are moving back to a two-class society as depicted above. A few days ago I saw the movie “Inside Job” which brilliantly outlined how this recession is making the rich richer and the poor poorer (NYTimes review for Inside Job). Even more troubling, this storm surge which erodes the middle class is not going to stop. Nothing has changed except the rich are even richer this year than the 2008 financial meltdown.

I think we are moving back towards feudalism. An upper class of rich, educated, powerful nobility, and a lower class of workers without much education or political leverage; wage slaves living from paycheck to paycheck. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations and the wealthy can contribute as much money as they want to elections, without revealing their names or intentions, I realize that we the voters have done it to ourselves.

Do you think that the middle class is being eradicated by the financial system?