If the middle class represents “the American dream,” the situation, goals and meanings of working-class life and identity are immediately thrown into question in the United States. Since the Second World War, one notes a continual decline in the presence, organization and impact of the working class as a result of both intergenerational changes in working-class families and external pressures from government and business. Indeed, the American working class at the end of the century tended to be represented in negative or nostalgic terms. Moreover, difference in work itself in the postwar period complicated any definitions that might convey an identification of working-class and factory life. Are service workers working class, whether flipping burgers at McDonald’s or typing in an office? Truckers? Farmers? Artists and intellectuals who speak for a class? Hence, it is impossible to talk about American working-class culture or organization in a sense comparable to traditions of Europe or Latin America. In fact, even while the situation of workers has become endangered by deindustrialization, lack of welfare safety nets, offshore production and imports, their response has tended to be conservative and patriotic. Nonetheless, the Left has seen this class as a potential locus for organization whose success might be epitomized in activities protesting trade agreements like the WTO in Seattle (1999).

Since the emergence of American industrialization, certain features have worked against the cohesion of working-class consciousness and action. One of these was the ideology of individual worth and mobility that the United States has held dear. Even if workers were trapped in a routine, they were taught that their children might find more security and gain, through education, homeownership, connections and hard work—the working class was a point of origin, not an end. Here, class and gender also coincided as the mother became especially charged with guiding children upward (or, in the case of the 1930s tearjerker Stella Dallas, not holding them back).

This was also tied to the politics of immigration and ethnicity. As immigrants found work in factories, they began to assimilate and identified mobility with citizenship. This meant that in the postwar period, Americanism could be identified with moving to the suburbs out of the old neighborhood (a battleground with new races or ethnicities trying to enter the workplace), replacing the blue-collar work shirt with a white shirt and tie, and getting a college education. Again, a generational perspective was important, as the GI Bill, 1950s prosperity and limits on new immigration promoted a generalized sense of mobility. Moreover, race clearly divided this class.

Some were left behind—especially where class intersected with race. African Americans moved into the Northeastern and Midwestern industrial workforce with the Great Migration, but found their opportunities for advancement constrained. Even in the Second World War and civil-rights era, they were often “last hired, first fired.” For many blacks, a solid upper-working-class job—post office or steady employment—has been read instead as a marker of middle-class identity. Single mothers, white and black, also constitute a large proportion of the “working poor.” Yet the dynamics of the disappearance of the working class do not rest with the working class. Business and government have long been uneasy about working-class organizations, especially if they betray any leftist or revolutionary consciousness (often imputed to “foreignness” or “anti-American sentiments”). Businesses have fought unions for a century often with government assistance. Meanwhile, both elites have often coopted workers into a sense of an American mission—to fight the Depression, win wars (where the working classes, black and white, are more likely to be soldiers), or rally against communism. Perhaps the most successful manipulation of this was the Reagan Revolution of 1980, where a conservative, elite Republican establishment rallied workers against the perceived threats of welfare moms, illegal immigrants and the Evil Empire rather than around issues of security safer and more just societies or healthcare and environmental stewardship.

The imagery of the working class in the US problematizes consciousness and culture.

Working-class culture is often defined, even in academic tomes, in terms of deficits or substitutes for institutions that reaffirm the middle class—neighborhoods, bars and churches for clubs and civic associations, etc. Clothes, accent, behavior and even body type tend to be treated as inferior versions of a middle-class norm (uneasily aping upper-class representations). Hence Paul Fussell writes sarcastically in Class that “If you can gauge people’s proximity to prole status by the color and polyester content of their garments, legibility of their dress is another sign…. When proles assemble to enjoy leisure, they seldom appear in clothing without words on it” (1992:56).

Mass media representations also affirm this generally negative overview, sometimes interlaced with nostalgia for a simple life now lost. Many actors use working class roles—smudged and unglamorous—in a manner analogous to portrayals of the disabled—to show their skills in being what they actively are not. Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas (1937) Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro in Stanley and Iris (1989) and Sharon Stone in The Mighty (1999) all demarcate a tradition of the working class as other for Hollywood. Works like John Sayle’s Matewan (1987) or some works of Barry Levinson and John Waters, among others, present more independent exceptions.

Television has done little more, although there were appeals to ethnic working-class neighborhoods in the golden age and a clear exaltation of working-class domesticity in The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955–71). The Roseanne (ABC, 1988–97) show, starring female comedian Roseanne Barr, also confronted issues of job insecurity and family budget, domestic tension, teenage behavior and other issues with humor and integrity Documentaries, including Salt of the Earth, Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA (1976) and American Dream (1990) and grassroots/activist videos have confronted these issues more politically While this may seem to present a bleak portrait of the working class and its future, one should not overlook possibilities of organization and action in coalition that continue to crop up in cities, environmental causes and even international politics. These are especially important where divisions of race, ethnicity and gender are overcome. Even intergenerational differences may pose compelling questions about the dream and its costs for children and grandchildren of working-class families.