“The Myth of Class in Jacksonian America” by Willian E. Gienapp is a critique of an earlier work on the Jackson Era by Charles G. Sellers. Gienapp argues that Sellers is strongly influenced by the cultural milieu in which he was writing. Gienapp accuses Sellers of permissiveness, racial guilt, antagonism towards capitalism, referring to “the establishment” and various other tendencies associated with 60’s radicalism. As a result, Sellers’s writing about the Jackson Era is more telling about the decade in which he was writing than his subject matter. This ties into a theme we’ve discussed previously in the course, that the context in which the historian is writing inevitably affects the content of his/her work. For Gienapp, Sellers is too emblematic of the cultural context in which he is writing and attempts to analyze the Jacksonian era through a paradigm of class conflict, where in reality there was no cohesive class structure to speak of.
In “The Refinement of America” by Richard L. Bushman, gentility spread throughout the United States despite the fact that the concept of aristocracy was soundly rejected by the republic. Bushman argues that although it may seem that genteel culture and the aristocratic implications that it brought was in conflict with democracy, access to genteel commodities powered by industrial capitalism in fact allowed middle and lower classes to obtain indicators of genteel predilections simply by buying them instead of being born with them. Not just material wealth, but manners were also of the utmost importance. The idea of gentility changes our discussion of class because while it does involve certain material aspects, such as fine clothing and houses, it also takes into account one’s manners and tastes. This fact only makes our study of class more complicated. Is class determined by material wealth, race, manners, or status? To what degree could a level of gentility really trump an undesirable quality?
These two articles had different interpretations of similar activities. In Gienapp’s writing, he describes a scene in which a Methodist minister advises a congregant to purchase furniture and silverware and to “give [his] wife and daughters a chance” (246). The man followed his instructions, lending his home a “domestic respectability” (246). However to Bushman, the purchase of “genteel adornments squandered the fruits of labor rather than conserving or encouraging them” (411). Consumption was contrary to the practical interests of the middle class, as well as the republican spirit. What I would like to discuss more in class is what drove the market in the middle of the nineteenth century. Was it a desire to seem genteel and cultured? Or was it more motivated by capitalist sensibilities? Are these two things tied together? Was the rise in consumption good for the middle class or not? Did the refining of genteel ideals make the class structure more or less cohesive?

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