Pam Peirce

The radicalism of the American revolution was that it was founded on horizontal relationships among people, not vertical. European monarchies included formal hierarchies.  The king was at the top and he was assumed to be ruling by divine right—his family was favored by God to provide the ruler.
     Then there was the nobility, who had the right to own land and be above commoners. but not to rule the nation. Below them were common people, who would always remain common people. The bourgeois, people who owned businesses, had begun to exist. Their business might give them some power, but they were still commoners.
     "Sumptuary laws" were the ones intended to keep people in their place. You might be a rich commoner, but you were still not permitted to wear certain cloth, or cloth dyed a certain color, for example.
     In the book The Hidden Injuries of Class, the authors, Richard Sennet and Jonathan Cobb, posit that the class is harder for Americans, because they imagine that they can rise in class—there is no belief system standing in the way. In a hierarchical society, there are "humble people," ones who know that rising in the class structure is not possible, so they don't even think about it. However, some Americans imagine that they should be able to become middle or upper class—there are no laws against it—and are bitterly disappointed when they do not.
     The worm at the core of the American apple was, of course, that the founders were thinking of white men with property, who were all to be equal. Americans were allowed to make exceptions for black slaves, and no one even thought of women as representing anything other than the status of their husbands. (I suppose that unmarried women were subsumed under the class status of the family member with whom they lived.) Nevertheless, we have come to a place in history in which many Americans take the promise of equality in the ability to rise quite seriously and are deeply dissatisfied when they cannot find a way to "move up."