Books: Bestseller Revisited, Jun. 8, 1959

THE STATUS SEEKERS (376 pp.)—Vonce Packard—McKay ($4.50).

On the train to Westport (so goes the story), a junior advertising executive was eagerly reading a book in a plain wrapper. The train hit a New Haven bump, the book fell to the floor, and the title was revealed for all to see: The Status Seekers. By the rules of status seeking, it was a serious goof: no smart social climber wants to be caught showing too much interest in the book, since anyone in secure social status should be above any concern with the restless and near-universal scramble for position that Author Vance (The Hidden Persuaders) Packard undertakes to describe.

Nevertheless, the book achieved bestseller status only eleven days after publication, and has received deferential critical attention as a serious sociological study. Actually, most of it is a rehash of what other academic private eyes have reported on the behavior of Americans, the modern world’s most relentlessly observed and observing people. None of it is new; some of it is highly intriguing; and all of it is dedicated to the dubious proposition that such “status symbols” as gold-plated bathroom fixtures and air-conditioned doghouses threaten the American dream.

Old Hat. A few years ago Britain’s Nancy Mitford wittily divided the social scene into U (for Upper Class) and non-17. Things are not that simple in the U.S., and in Author Packard’s scheme there are Real U and Semi-U, both belonging to the college-bred “Diploma Elite”; then there are the “Supporting Classes,” in turn subdivided into Limited-Success. Working Class and Real Lower (in his definitions, Packard rarely gets much more precise than to say that the Diploma Elite consists of “the big, active, successful people who pretty much run things” ). This structure, asserts Packard, is becoming increasingly rigid: within it. people are continually straining “to surround themselves with visible evidence of the superior rank they are claiming.”

Packard’s examples of this struggle are frequently arresting—the builders who try to make their houses sound classy (Une maison ranch très originate), the executive who had his parents moved from an unfashionable cemetery to a posher last resting place. The trouble is that too much of what Author Packard observes is old hat, such as the upper-class preference for old hats over flashy new ones. He over-generalizes. One dubious example: Americans of Anglo-Saxon ancestry like to point to their past by living in Early American, white clapboard houses, while Jews prefer modern architecture, since no one would credit them with an Early American ancestry anyway. And, searching for meanings, he wildly overinterprets. Example: American women do not like to ride motorcycles because, perched on the back seat, they would have to assume a position secondary to the male. (The real explanation just might be that a pillion ride on a motorbike is hard on coiffure, makeup and rump).

Top Dog. At 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, et al.

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. In a closed society where “everyone knows his place,” people need not and often cannot strive for status; it is given them at birth and stays with them until their fashionable or unfashionable grave.

At one point Author Packard prints a chart of the social acceptability of various professions. Pennsylvania-born Vance Packard himself has risen in that scale. He began as a newspaperman (42nd place), but he is now considered a sociologist (27th). He lives in New Canaan, Conn., in a twelve-room house (white frame), and has a Weimaraner, just about the highest-status dog available.