jaylar
The Class system has existed from earliest times. These people were on top, those were middle and those were bottom.
Where a population is homogeneous, that is, basically the same appearance and same religion, Class is the way to categorize different parts of the population.
The American Revolution was fought by the local Aristocracy which felt aggrieved by the disrespect those in England evidenced towards them.
They were educated, they were just as good as those in the land where many of them had been born.
After the revolution, America had a ‘democracy’ similar to that of Ancient Greece; to vote one needed to own land.
The Class structure in America was fluid, there were those who might have come in poverty but acquired wealth and became upper class.
It was after World War II, during the Cold War, where the structures had to be dismantled. The communist Soviet Union was educating its people, America had to ensure that it was equal.
It is during the 1950s/1960s into the 1970s that education was free up to High School, and there were numerous programs to insure that the brightest would not be handicapped by financial disability.
This led to an extremely educated population which thought for themselves and were not easily led.
When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, when Russia came into being with a similar pattern that the United States had held pre-World War II, the need to produce an educated population was discarded.
