Great Depression and the middle class: Experts, collegiate youth and business ideology, 1929--1941

The dissertation examines how middle-class expert authors and collegiate youths collaboratively constructed a discourse that organized a shared sense of middle-class identity during the Great Depression. Many historians have contended that discourse in America took a leftward turn during the economically turbulent 1930s and that Americans embraced the rhetoric of the labor movement. I argue that college students and experts adopted the language of the marketplace, the logic of capitalism, and the process of self-commodification to make sense of their situation and to erect social barriers to protect a threatened middle-class status.; College campuses operated as fields where middle-class youths could define themselves as individuals, make connections with their peers, and gather necessary skills and experiences to bolster their resumes. The middle-class discourse about college life upheld the tenets of striving for individual success, competing with peers for accolades and honors, and accruing the symbolic capital of a college degree as viable methods for proving that youths had transformed themselves into adults who were worthy of inheriting access to professional careers and the middle-class lifestyle.; Using expert-authored texts, mass-marketed advice manuals, and newspapers from Amherst College, George. Washington University, Howard University, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Michigan, I elucidate how undergraduates willingly engaged in the defining process of attending college in order to prove themselves as valuable commodities who were worthy of earning academic honors, pledging to Greek organizations, taking on leadership roles on campus, or becoming popular with their peers. Undergraduates looked to experts for advice on how to further their social interests, raise their caches of symbolic capital, shape themselves into desirable commodities, and move themselves---much like merchandise---into symbolic marketplaces. Experts and students utilized the terminology of the business rhetoric of the 1920s in combination with the gender norms of the pre-feminist era with the hope that the mixture of ideologies would provide them with a sense of stability that the Depression had greatly disrupted.; Middle-class youths and experts embraced the notion that aligning themselves with the corporate order would protect them from the worst effects of the Depression and that the language of the marketplace and business ideology bled over into the realms of fraternity and sorority life, rating and dating, and marriage and family life.