Spy anxiety; the smart magazine that makes smart people nervous about their status.

• Author: DeParle, Jason

Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly.

Not long ago The New York Times Sunday real estate section ran an article about a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. The Times quoted one "Julian Frank, a freelance art director unhappily sharing a crowded flat in Manhattan," on the proper weighing of the factors, pro and con, of moving to a decent place in Prospect Heights: "Once you've lived in New York awhile, you know there are a lot of cheap places to live, but there aren't a lot of cheap acceptable places, in the sense that you can't live there-you can't tell people you live there, see? It's not acceptable. A while ago this area was not acceptable, but now it is, It's crazy, but it's New York."

What would happen to Julian Frank if he moved to an area that was not acceptable? It's not too hard to conjure up his worries-not too hard, because you've probably had similar worries yourself. There's a party, let's say in a loft with a view of the river, the kind of party that makes you feel like a winner for being in attendance, full of interesting, successful, attractive people making bright talk. Let's say in Julian's case that a lot of art directors, illustrators, and photographers are there, so that there's a kind of automatic career-building charge in the air, At one point somebody says, "Hey, whatever happened to old Julian? I haven't seen him around lately." There's a moment of silence. Then someone else says, "I heard he moved to Rego Park-that's in Queens. I thought about calling him the other day, but he's in a different area code." The group laughs appreciatively and gaily moves onto another subject.

It's a chilling prospect. The fear of making some gaffe that will cause consignation to a dreary outer circle of society is one that grips not just Manhattan but a vast portion of middle-class America, particularly from mid-middle class on up, and it seems to be gening worse. Is my child in the right kindergarten? Am I drinking the right scotch? Have I seen the right art exhibits? To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, do you feel less nervous about your place in the world than you did ten years ago? Probably not.

This pervasive status anxiety is what social scientists like to call an unintended consequence-a consequence of the great democratization of American society since the Depression. The engine of class leveling was the combination of economic prosperity and a more equitable distribution of income. And with the passage of the GI Bill, a college education, once the exclusive coin of the well-to-do, became common currency. The post-war boom that brought good-jobs at good wages, home ownership, and college educations to the masses made snobbery, even in the conformist 1950s, seem doomed. Pick at random any book from the shelf of the liberal-consensus school of the 1940s and 1950s, and you'll find the confident belief that snobbery was a peculiarity of the Gilded Age WASP economic plutocracy, a custom fast being crowded out of modern life.

Here in 1952 is Frederick Lewis Allen in The Big Change:

"What was striking about the social pattern of 1900, as we look back upon it today, was that in most communities it was much cleaner and simpler, the stratifications more generally recognized, and especially that they were generally taken much more seriously than they are today. . . .The rich man smokes the same sort of cigarettes as the poor man, shaves with the same sort of razor, uses the same sort of telephone, vacuum cleaner, radio, and TV set, has the same sort of lighting and heating equipment in his house, and so on indefinitely. . . .Nor should we overlook the immense influence of mass circulation magazines, the movies, the radio, and television in imposing upon Americans of all income levels the same patterns of emulation: in other words, making them want to be the same sort of people . . . .In short, the social distance between the extremes of American society is shrinking. . . .The pattern is kaleidoscopic, to the confusion of organized snobbery."

Mrs. Astor's tenure

As anyone can attest who, say, has scanned the ads in an upscale magazine recently, America has shown great ingenuity in resisting the classlessness that Allen saw as its fate. In retrospect, the harbinger of today's social jitters was the emergence of what New York gossip columnists of the forties dubbed "Cafe Society"-a free-floating group composed of legatees of Old Society, minor members of the European nobility, actors, writers, artists, entertainers, publicists, fashion designers, sports stars, and publishers who spent their evenings in New York nightclubs such as the Stork Club and El Morocco. What was new about Cafe Society was that, since it wasn't based on lavish private entertaining, it didn't require wealth or power as a precondition to membership. Instead, it was necessary merely to be attractive, amusing, sophisticated, glamorous, or well known, and it included, oddly enough, those who were known simply for being known. The thirst for publicity was so strong that debutantes such as Corbina Wright Jr. and Brenda Frazier were reputed to have press agents. Old Society lingered on, of course, and being born into its numbers was still a great advantage; the publication of the Celebrity, Register didn't replace the Social Register as much as signal that other paths to status were possible. But since birth meant less than it had previously, membership in Cafe Society was both more open and more insecure-through some misfortune in your career, you could be drummed out.

Cafe Society, though amply chronicled in the press, was tiny, a curiosity item in the broad context of a more democratic American society. But its ethos spread steadily, with glittering mixes of people from different fields uniting much more by wit, style, taste, and renown than by commonality of financial and ethnic credentials. This social principle later got a huge boost during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, who had put in his time at the Stork Club in the years following World War II and brought Cafe Society style to Washington.

Meanwhile, back in thc fifties, the trends that Frederick Lewis Allen wrote about were creating an ever-larger class of people who were educated, ambitious, prosperous but not spectacularly rich, and, compared to past generations, unusually mobile across the old boundaries of geography and social position. They were people who wanted some kind of elite status but for whom the role of robber baron was unattainable and that of the Babbitt-like local burgher was unappealing. The dream of this group was to join a relatively large national class that can best be described, oxymoronically, as a democratic aristocracy: a distinc"better class of people," in which membership was open to anyone regardless of the circumstances of his or her birth.

Once you got above a certain upper-middle-class floor, money was not the crucial factor for determining membership in this new meritocratic elite (though it's more important). Nor was the possession of a college degree, since ever more people had them. The kind of college degree became more important (was it, in today's parlance, "a hot college"?), as did other credentials, job titles, and the criteria of taste, style, and celebrity. Since membership among the new elite was a less secure commodity, taste badges took on new importance as a means of maintaining status-Mrs. Astor had tenure, Sally Quinn doesn't. The relative rise in equality that Frederick Lewis Allen thought would eliminate the differences in choice of razor, cigarette, and home lighting instead made those choices all the more crucial for those eager to make the grade. How else to set oneself apart? Institutions that could help people qualify for the democratic aristocracy thrived. (This is why Stanley H. Kaplan, the Monarch of Meritocracy, is a rich man today.) At the style-tastefame end of the credentials spectrum, no institution has been more influential than the magazine publishing industry.

Wally Cleaver's dad

Frederick Lewis Allen wrote about an explosion in mass-circulation magazines (there were more magazines with circulations over a million in 1952 than there are today) and assumed that they would promote snobbery-free mass tastes. But television drew the bulk of national mass-market advertising away from magazines, and most of the big slicks (Look, Colliers...