Word: classe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dreary Fall of 1930, midway between Wall Street's Great Crash and Roosevelt's Presidential campaign, 897 young men arrived in Cambridge for Freshman Registration--Harvard's Class of '34. On that day, September 19, bootleggers shot and killed a Federal revenue agent in a New Jersey brewery, Einstein submitted a paper on "Theory of Space Conceptions with Riemanian Metrics and Extended Parallelism," and U.S. Steel closed the market with...
While the Class of '34 lived around the Square, the Old Order's crisis deepened, and Roosevelt's New Deal burst dramatically into almost everyone's life. Politically and economically, it was an exciting era--but in Cambridge, undergraduate attention seemed to focus more on the football field than on the stock market...
...they enjoy today. The CRIMSON wondered editorially whether the new social system might not infringe on student individuality, and the undergraduates themselves were not uniformly anxious to commit their College life to the House idea. As the months rolled on, however, one House after another was completed, and the Class of '34 became the first (in history) to spend all three of its upperclass years as members of a House system that quickly gained student respect...
...times Packard is patently misinformed, as when he asserts that class structures are more flexible in Britain than in the U.S., and he over-sentimentalizes the American past, suggesting that only yesterday Horatio Alger was king. "Status striving" to him seems to be a modern menace, and he writes of it with scant mention of Thorstein ("conspicuous consumption") Veblen or of the massive, fascinating and often exhilarating social climbs described by Balzac, Stendhal, Jane Austen...
Interesting though much of Packard's evidence may be, it never really proves his basic point that U.S. class lines are hardening. In fact it suggests just the opposite-a continually changing social scene. At one point Packard himself concedes that the "American populace [is] arranged along a continuum [with] a series of bulges and contractions." Much of what Packard describes as status seeking is indeed foolish, and some of it may be evil; but much of it is also the result of man's human status, and the product of a free and mobile society...