“God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission” (John Winthrop, 1630)

The above excerpt comes from “A Model of Christian Charity,” which was delivered by John Winthrop as he sailed with fellow colonists on the Arbella in 1630, en route from England to plant their colony in Massachusetts.  

Many see Winthrop’s speech, in its entirety, as a brilliant vision for a utilitarian social order. His reasoning and logic was solid.  The cultural demographic on the ship ranged from lower orders of labor and skill craftsmen, along with political and religious refugees and wealthy merchants; all were in search of a new life and economic opportunity in America.

Presciently, Winthrop established socioeconomic expectations for the group, and with foresight, he knew the success of the colony was interdependent upon the hard work of lower orders of labor, ingenuity of entrepreneurial merchants, and required a charitable elite to balance out social order in the New World.  Each class constituted a piece of the social weal, whose survival depended upon unconditional mutual cooperation.  Without utilitarian order, the colony would fail.  For Winthrop, failure was not an option.

Today, some view Winthrop’s speech as the original blueprint for American socioeconomic class division and a byproduct of English society.  However, the need for socioeconomic division become apparent after the second Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century, when capitalists relied on a steady stream of lower orders of labor to fill the factories which resulted with the large concentration of capital as industrialists consolidated their holdings. 

In the spirit of Winthrop’s pragmatism, the lower classes of impoverished settlers relied on the wealthy, and conversely, the wealthy were dependent on the poor.  Initially, the social inter-dependency was symbiotic; however, at some point wealth-holders lost their moral compass as socioeconomic reciprocity evaporated.  The industrialists of the nineteenth century had amassed enormous fortunes acquired from a consumerist market system whose success relied on a perpetually-impoverished class of laborers.  The consumerist market created enormous wealth, but at the expense of stagnant wages for workers who remained in a cycle of poverty.  Paradoxically, this was known as The Gilded Age.