When the United States was founded at the end of the 18th century, the new nation was overwhelmingly rural, and agriculture absolutely dominated the economy. The great majority of families either farmed or were independent artisans, many of the latter skilled crafts people who catered to farmers either directly or indirectly. Over the course of the 19th century, America urbanized and industrialized. Farming remained essential, but as the decades rolled by, more and more people lived in cities, and an increasing number of them worked in factories.
During this long transition, new generations of industrial workers struggled to recapture the independence and dignity that earlier generations had known as farmers and independent artisans. This was a challenge as new factory jobs often entailed mind-numbing menial labor and working for someone else. Conditions deteriorated as job-safety and security 
became scarce. Wages also suffered as unskilled and semi-skilled laborers were easily replaced and had little bargaining power. Thus, while the new industrial economy transformed natural resources into finished products and created a vast, national wealth the likes of which had never been seen before, that money was distributed very inequitably. Fortunes aggregated into the coffers of the few while the masses increasingly slogged through poverty.
At the same time, however, there also appeared a new, urban middle class, a cadre of professional managers. As large businesses began to emerge during the mid-19th century, they developed a new bureaucratic layer of managers who tended to the interests of the 
investor/owners by overseeing the mass of workers.
These new middle class urbanites were often skilled craftsmen who emerged from the shop floor to rise up the new corporate ranks. Receiving more financial compensation, they also now boasted a higher social standing as they traded manual work for office work. This status was evident in the color of their paper collars and matching shirts: white. The grit and the grime of manual labor made white shirts impractical for industrial workers; cleaning them was a nightmare, and thus blue shirts eventually became common. But men who worked with paper and ink instead of gears and grease could afford the luxury of wearing white, which soon became a marker of social class as well as economic standing. In one industry after another, white collar workers relied on some combination of highly technical, job-related skill sets, and often some formal education, to secure their position as well-paid managers.
But the position of unskilled and semi-skilled workers was far more tenuous. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that decades-worth of agitation and struggle finally began to pay off for blue collar workers. Friendly New Deal legislation, the rise of organized labor, and the unparalleled industrial might of the United States all combined to create favorable 
circumstances. Early large-scale unions such as the National Labor Union, the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the American Federation of Labor had all failed to bring comprehensive reform to the masses of American workers between the 1860s-1920s. But beginning in the 1930s, a new generation of labor unions that included the United Auto Workers, the United Steel Workers, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and a reformed American Federation of Labor, succeeded in establishing job security, safer workplace conditions, and middle class wages for the bulk of America’s industrial workers. As a consequence, during the quarter-century following WWII, the color of a man’s shirt collar often had less to do with economic class and more to do with social class. A union worker at a car factory or a steel plant might not have had the same social standing as an middle manager, but they might very well have been earning a competitive wage.
During this era, college degrees were hardly a must for finding a good job in either the blue or white collar worlds. For example, my uncle made it through only one semester of community college, but nevertheless landed a job at a major insurance company where he forged a career in middle management and eventually retired 
with a healthy pension. His situation was not unusual. And at the same time, a high level of skill was not needed to find gainful employment in the world of manual labor. I often think of the man I met at a local pizzeria who once told me how he’d dropped out of high school during his senior year in the early 1970s, and by the next week he’d landed a job at the Sparrow’s Point steel plant (once the world’s largest). He bragged that his starting salary was higher than that of the principal at the school he’d abandoned. The long and the short of it all is that middle class wages were once attainable without either a college degree or a high level of manual skill.
Those days are over.
A good paying, white collar job is almost impossible to find without a college degree today, 
barring the odd rags to riches story of someone who works their way up the ranks. And as for blue collar workers, the halcyon days of union wages for semi-skilled workers are all but gone. After bragging about getting his job at Sparrow’s Point, in the next breath the man at the pizzeria lamented that he wished he had stayed in school after all; the number of jobs at the plant dwindled as the factory mechanized and the industry faced stiff competition from abroad. He was eventually laid off and has never come close to recapturing a middle class lifestyle.
He is hardly alone, and in the next part we’ll examine how the collapse of unions, changes in the economy, and the decline of public education have all contributed to a severe contraction of the middle class and the massive expansion of a permanent under class in America.