The uneven rewards of professional labor: wealth and income in the Chicago professions, 1870-1920.

In 1879, the Illinois State Medical Society formed a Special Committee on Medical Education, headed by the prominent Chicago physician Ephraim Ingals, to study the conditions of medical training and practice in Illinois. In its report, the committee was especially disheartened by the low levels of compensation received by physicians. "The excess of numbers in the profession," the members complained, "occasions so small a subdivision of the field of practice, as to render the emoluments that flow from it inadequate to the maintenance of the rank that should reward a cultivated profession for the skilled bestowal of its blessings to society."(1) Far from unique, this objection to the allegedly insufficient rewards of professional practice abounds in the observations of professionals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Chicago and elsewhere.(2) In contrast to most historical interpretations about the rise of expert occupations during this period,(3) many professionals were far less certain about the economic viability of independent professional practice. Yet if late 19th-century American professionals were indeed primarily concerned with acquiring market power through monopolization strategies and the demarcation of occupational 'jurisdictions,' as many authors have argued,(4) the wealth and income of members of the learned professions provide an important measure of their success.

Given the discrepancies between contemporary complaints about professional poverty and modern accounts, it is surprising how little is known about the economic parameters of professional practices in this crucial time period in the evolution of the modern professions in the United States. The proliferation of historical and sociological studies on professions and professionalization has largely concentrated on changes in professional knowledge, on the modernization of standards of training and licensure, on professional associations, and on the experiences of some renowned practitioners.(5) Little attention has been paid to the social history of the professions; data on the social backgrounds of American professionals, on their educational attainments and strategies, on their career patterns, and on their economic fortunes are sorely lacking. Part of this deficit is due to the problems in collecting quantitative information on large numbers of independent practitioners. It also points to a scholarly preoccupation with issues of professionalization that has overlooked the more mundane aspects of professional existence. In addition, historical studies of social mobility also offer little data on the professions. In their emphasis on mobility between broadly-defined clusters of occupations, they have almost completely neglected the role played by intra-occupational systems of stratification and mobility. While their approach might be sufficient for the 19th century, the evolution of modern white-collar and professional vocations, with their often complex internal hierarchies, calls for a finer-grained approach to issues of inequality and mobility.(6) What is evident is that the impressionistic and scattered nature of the information on professional incomes available in the existing literature can hardly sustain arguments about their social positions.

That not all professionals achieved equal levels of economic success is not surprising; what is remarkable, however, is the extent to which economic inequality within professional occupations exceeded those in other occupations at the time. By focusing on the experiences of Chicago lawyers, physicians, and engineers between 1870 and 1920 - three of the largest and most important American expert occupations that also differed widely in their market positions and career tracks -, one can obtain a clearer picture of the financial dynamics of professional work. These three occupations differed in important aspects. Engineering, especially, was a newcomer still attempting to establish its professional credentials, a fact that engineers were acutely aware of. By including them in the argument, however, one can gain a better appreciation for the diverse terrain on which the development of professional occupations took place. Based on the analysis of data on thousands of Chicago practitioners, this article will outline the highly hierarchical structure of rewards and opportunities in the American professions around 1900.(7) The varying levels of economic success encountered in Chicago and elsewhere formed an important and highly salient source of occupational stratification. All professionals might have benefitted from the rising prestige of science and technology, but this did not diminish the levels of socioeconomic inequality within and among different occupations. The very magnitude of this inequality should compel historians to rethink notions of the middle-class character of professional occupations and to focus more attention on the dynamics shaping the structure of occupational communities.

The data presented here also call into question some of the assumptions underlying theories of professionalization. It is certainly possible to identify some elements of professionalization that exerted a uniform influence on the development of expert vocations. More often than not, however, professionalization actually magnified the differences within and among the professions. Not only did the gap separating them from 'ordinary' occupations widen, the terrain on which expert callings moved grew more diverse, too. The lines of distinction between individual professions were accentuated, largely through the efforts of professionals themselves to demarcate occupational boundaries, at the same time that they grew more heterogeneous internally. While similar mechanics and pathways might have shaped the American professions around 1900, their specific trajectories moved them further apart. The dialectic of strengthened boundary lines and internal segmentation falls outside the purview of traditional theories of professionalization. Only by adding sociohistorical detail to the scaffold of professionalization theory can one gain a better understanding of the rise of the American professions.

Every study of the socioeconomic status of occupational groups in the 19th and early 20th centuries has to start with the federal census. Despite the problems of accuracy and representativeness, it offers the only source for a glimpse at the position of the thousands of professional practitioners trying to make a living in Chicago. By using several indicators of achievement and 'rewards' - ownership of real and personal property, the employment of servants, home ownership, and the priciness of neighborhood of residence - a diachronic statistical portrait of lawyers, physicians, and engineers can be assembled. The indicators used often measure aspects of the lives of professionals that do not correspond to each other. Ownership of property is a fairly direct reflection of wealth and income, while the decisions to employ a servant or to locate in a specific neighborhood were also informed by considerations of life-style and cultural status. Taken together, however, the data presented here sketch the outline of socioeconomic achievement among professionals in Chicago.

In the large body of social mobility studies professionals are commonly classified as belonging to the high white-collar group. Thus one would expect them to display the sizable ownership of property one commonly associates with this group. A city like Chicago in the 19th century, with its rapid population growth, relatively open social structure, and expanding economic opportunities, should have made the acquisition of property especially easy.(8) Yet in 1870, the impressive average levels of wealth in the three groups only mask a highly uneven distribution of property. A substantial proportion of Chicago lawyers, physicians, and engineers owned little or no personal and real property in 1870. Utilizing the information on property ownership available in the 1870 federal census schedules, it becomes clear that all three occupations were highly stratified (table 1). A relatively small elite of individuals reported significant levels of property, while between one and two-thirds of the members of each occupation claimed to own nothing. Fewer professionals owned real property, yet the distribution among the three groups duplicates the patterns of the distribution of personal property. At the same time, lawyers and doctors were noticeably better off than their counterparts in engineering. The latter group, largely composed of salaried employees, could not compete economically with the independent practitioners in law and medicine. Overall, more professionals owned property than was true for all heads of households in the city in 1870.(9) But behind this general prosperity existed substantial differences in wealth holding within and among the three occupations. Chicago was far from unique in this regard; studies on other cities in this period - based on less comprehensive census information, occasional tax returns, or informed estimates - report comparable patterns of wealth holding.(10) The explosive growth of Chicago and the large presence of newcomers in the city did not produce a distorted picture of professional property ownership; it rather reflected a national pattern in which a small professional elite held a disproportionate share of the total wealth, while a substantial number of professionals reported no property at all.

In analyzing patterns of wealth holding in Chicago in 1860, David Galenson has suggested that ethnicity was far less salient than occupation in determining levels of property ownership.(11) A regression analysis of the impact of selected variables on wealth among professionals certainly lends support to this argument. Factors such as place of birth of the professionals and their fathers consistently had less influence on property ownership than occupation. Not surprisingly, age was also important, with older professionals owning more wealth than younger counterparts. Yet a sizable proportion of older professionals reported no or little property. Age alone cannot account for the widespread wealth inequality.(12) In general, however, it is surprising how few of the variations in the patterns of property ownership can be explained by reference to the independent variables [TABULAR DATA FOR TABLE 1 OMITTED] utilized in the regression analysis.(13) The multiple R for the equation relating to personal wealth was .329, the one for real wealth only .256, an indication of the limited explanatory power of the variables included in the equation. One might speculate that Chicago, as a relatively new and rapidly expanding city, offered equal chances to professional newcomers and did not allow for the effective discrimination against any specific ethnic or social group. This openness, however, did not result in an equal distribution of economic resources; it coexisted with a stark contrast between small and wealthy professional elites and large numbers of economically-insecure practitioners.

Another indicator of material prosperity contained in the census schedules, the number of live-in servants, confirms the results of the analysis of real and personal property. About two-thirds of the households headed by an attorney employed at least one servant; the same was true for about half of the families of physicians. By contrast, only slightly more than ten per cent of the engineering households contained a servant. This finding provides the most dramatic illustration of the contrasting life-styles of the three occupations. At a time when the employment of a servant formed a central element of a genteel life-style, this sign of status was out of the reach of the overwhelming majority of engineers. Lawyers and physicians fared much better.(14) Property ownership and the employment of servants were closely linked. Both point to the existence of a professional hierarchy of income and wealth that set a small elite in each occupation apart from the rank-and-file, while simultaneously distinguishing lawyers and doctors from the poorer engineers.

Though the 1910 census no longer provided information on property ownership, it can nevertheless be employed to yield other indices of wealth and status - the land values of the residences of Chicago professionals, patterns of home ownership, and the employment of live-in servants - that allow an analysis of the divergent economic positions of professionals. By combining information from the census with the land values of specific Chicago blocks as recorded in Olcott's Chicago Land Values, one can arrive at an estimate of the costs associated with living in a certain neighborhood.(15) An analysis of the average land value per square foot of the blocks on which these professionals resided shows that lawyers and physicians strikingly resembled each other in their distribution across the different land value brackets, while engineers tended to live in areas less costly (table 2). The gap between the first two occupations and engineers is even more pronounced if one only includes heads of households in the analysis. Given the wide availability of different forms of housing in Chicago and the fine-grained distinctions among them, the dispersion of professionals across neighborhoods with contrasting land values formed one of the most sensitive registers of inter-occupational distances in material resources. The analysis also reaffirms the existence of substantial differences within the legal, medical, and engineering occupations.

Table 2
Average Land Value per Square Foot of Heads of Household in 1910

                    Lawyers       Physicians      Engineers
Land Value($)       N = 1652       N = 1574       N = 1413

0-49                 19.1%          18.0%           28.0%
50-99                39.5%          40.5%           41.2%
100-199              24.9%          27.4%           22.4%
200-299              10.4%           8.3%            5.9%
300 and over          6.0%           4.8%            2.5%

                     $147            $143            $124
Missing Cases(a)      146              67              96

a. The missing cases were professionals who resided in suburbs for
which no listing of land values was available.

Source: Census Schedules, 1910; Olcott's Land Values of Chicago and
Suburbs (Chicago, 1910).

A multiple regression analysis showed only weak correlations between land values and such variables as occupation, family, size, age, and ethnicity. As had been the case in the analysis of the data on property ownership found in the 1870 census, ethnicity played little role in shaping the geographical location of professionals as measured by real estate values. Older professionals and those that employed more servants resided in more affluent areas while individuals that the census listed as employees, overwhelmingly engineers, and those with more children lived in less expensive locations. Somewhat surprisingly, professionals who rented their homes tended to reside in more affluent neighborhoods. For them, a good location was more important than home ownership.

Given the high social standing commonly associated with professional vocations, it is surprising to note that only a minority of professionals in Chicago owned their houses. Overall, 36.6 per cent of the attorneys in the sample owned their homes in 1910, compared to 28.3 per cent of the physicians and only 17.8 per cent of the engineers.(16) In Chicago as a whole, about one-fourth of all households owned their homes.(17) Lawyers thus stood well above the average while engineers once again lagged behind. A number of social historical studies have underlined the difficulty of relating patterns of home ownership to such factors as occupation, class, and ethnicity.(18) Occupation sometimes proved more important than ethnicity; in other cities the situation was reversed.(19) In Chicago, neither of the two factors possessed a strong impact on home ownership among professionals; the Beta coefficients for the variables occupation and place of birth in the Multiple Classification Analysis were only .08. By contrast, the factors land values, age, and number of servants exerted more influence. High land values had a negative relation to the proclivity to own homes, whereas increasing age and a large number of servants made individuals more likely to purchase their home. Overall, the Multiple R for this equation stood at .447, substantially higher than for the 1870 property data. A further finding reveals that engineers were more conservative in their home-buying strategies. Almost 60 per cent of the engineers who owned a house had no mortgage attached to it, compared to only about 40 per cent of lawyers and doctors. Facing a more volatile labor market and the prospects of unemployment, most engineers were reluctant to borrow money to purchase a home.(20) Members of the other two professions apparently felt more confident about the security of their financial position.

In 1870, the presence of live-in servants had formed an important indicator of the divergent material circumstances of law, medicine, and engineering. In that year, about 70 per cent of the attorneys who were heads of households employed at least one servant; the same was true for about every second physician but for only slightly less than 10 per cent of the engineers. In the ensuing forty years the employment of live-in servants among Chicago professionals declined sharply, yet the overall distributions of servants among the three occupations remained stable. Now, about two out of every five legal and medical households employed a live-in servant compared to less than one of five for engineers. Starting in the late 19th century, but accelerating after 1900, fewer and fewer live-in servants could be found in the United States. Even for well-to-do families, the presence of a live-in servant became increasingly unaffordable.(21) In this context, the fact that a large minority of legal and medical households in Chicago continued to employ live-in servants illustrates the stable and sizable income of an important segment of these professions. The employment of servants was an unequivocal marker of income and social status. It differentiated the affluent segments within each profession from their less fortunate colleagues and also separated law and medicine from engineering. Fewer families enjoyed the services of a servant than four decades before, but the ones that did were clearly distinct from the rest.

As mentioned earlier, factors such as the presence of servants and residential location were hardly unambiguous and direct measures of socioeconomic achievement. Though influenced by the income at the disposal of a professional family, they were also shaped by the wish to create and display a specific style of life, to live up to notions of respectability and decorum independent of considerations of income. Unfortunately, no information exists to shed a systematic light on the decision-making processes involved here. But two episodes provide a tantalizingly brief look into some of the dynamics that informed perceptions among the social order of Chicago professionals. Both date from the early 1900s and involve confrontations between professional families and other social actors. In the first of these two incidents, Chicago lawyer George E. Dawson, who rented out the first floor of the house his family owned, faced the prospect of losing his tenants. The wife of the renter, a Mrs. Dilts, notified him that because her husband had been transferred to a position in DeKalb, Illinois, by his company - he apparently worked for a railway company - they would have to break the lease and move. Dawson, annoyed about the prospect of having to find new tenants, insisted that the Dilts find somebody willing to take over their lease as stipulated by their rental agreement, and also found himself "somewhat apprehensive of trouble in getting the rent." Things worked out for the best, though, as a Dr. West, an assistant at the PostGraduate Medical School, stopped by to rent the apartment together with some other students at the school. Dawson was elated by this development and was convinced that "it will be a better outfit than the Dilts crowd."(22) He clearly felt more comfortable with tenants of a more distinguished social status than the working class Dilts' family.

The second incident involved the wife of Chicago physician Emilius C. Dudley, Anne, and shows even more clearly some of the moral and social dispositions in professional families. While Dudley was on vacation, she reported a visit by a Mrs. Nichols, the wife of their landlord, and three of her friends to her house. The group had come to view some portraits, and although Anne Dudley felt hardly presentable, "my hair half down - hands soiled" since she had been engaged in house cleaning, "without much more ado - they walked into the parlor and upstairs." Even the protests of the maid, who exclaimed that the upstairs rooms were not ready yet, could not stop Mrs. Nichols. "And I suppose it would have been the same if I had been dressing myself. I was too indignant for words," Anne Dudley related to her husband. She continued: "But did I ever hear of such impertinence. She is a coarse, vulgar woman and because I live in her house, I do not propose to be made one of her dear friends."(23) Much like George E. Dawson, Anne Dudley attempted to distance herself and her home from individuals and associations she considered beneath her, in this case using the maid as an additional buffer. Mrs. Nichols had violated the sanctity of her home, a virtually unpardonable affront among 'middle-class' families, and had imposed the presence of herself and her friends on a highly unwilling host. Although involving different issues, both episodes center around the relations of professional families with other social actors and illustrate how notions of respectability structured the outlook and behavior of professionals. They show actors highly aware of the lines separating respectable and coarse elements of society and seeking to introduce an element of social distance in their interactions with others. It was amidst these complex deliberations that life-style decisions were formed. But even though some of the indices of status derived from the census thus reveal much more than just wealth and income, they nevertheless contribute to an understanding of the economic success of professionals by demarcating the space in which the issue of life-style unfolded.

Despite the ambiguity of some of the findings, the highly uneven rewards of professional labor emerge clearly from the analysis. The magnitude of wealth differences within each profession is easily comparable to the differences among occupational clusters as reported by social mobility studies. Though this might seem surprising at first, it should not be forgotten that sociological investigations of occupational earnings in the 20th century have demonstrated that the extent of intra-occupational differences can be as great or greater than those between occupations.(24) Because much of the literature on the history of income and wealth inequalities in the United States has not broken down individual occupations into their respective segments, but has been organized on the premise that occupational titles describe largely uniform groups, the intra-occupational dimension of wealth differences has escaped serious scrutiny. Movement across the collar line was undoubtedly important, yet so was the rise of practitioner from divorce lawyer to corporate attorney. A new and more refined conception of the internal structures of occupations is needed to further explore the nature, the dynamics, and the consequences of the internal status hierarchies that segmented professional vocations. And because so much social mobility in the 20th century has taken place within occupational communities and within corporate career ladders,(25) we need to reconceptualize social mobility and its implication for the American social structure.

Although the census data allow a reconstruction of the outline of economic inequality within the professions, they offer little insight into the mechanisms and strategies employed by the professionals to maximize their incomes. Some undoubtedly built their fortunes solely upon the basis of their professional earnings. Even in early Chicago, these could be substantial. The account book of Dr. Nathan S. Davis, the founder of the Chicago Medical College and one of the leading physicians in the city, for example, listed an annual income of almost $19,000 for the year 1867.(26) Lambert Tree, an aspiring attorney, reported in 1859 that the law firm he was running with a partner had enjoyed a business of $28,000 in the last 18 months. And the Chicago Legal News reported of another Chicago lawyer, William C. Goudy, in 1885 that "his professional income has been higher than that of any other lawyer in the State, his legal fees being over forty thousand dollars per annum."(27) Few Chicago professionals achieved such a level of prosperity in their practices in the 1870s and 1880s, however. Corporate law and medical specialization, later to emerge as important means to increase professional incomes, had not yet reconfigured the professional market place.

Instead, many professionals used real estate speculation to amass large holdings. Much of the history of the city in its early decades is closely linked to the ebb and flow of the real estate market that sent land values soaring in one year, only to send them crashing down shortly thereafter. The generation of boosters that guided the destinies of the city in the years after its incorporation in 1837 was especially interested in investing in land. Real estate speculation emerged as the favorite pastime of Chicagoans,(28) including many professionals. Melville Fuller, who had started his career in Chicago in 1856 and later became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, invested his earnings in real estate. By 1867, he was registering a net income of over $18,000.(29) The professionals listed in the 1870 census who reported extensive real estate holdings undoubtedly followed a similar path. Even the most lucrative practice could hardly yield an income sufficient to acquire real property worth more than $50,000, an amount that was topped by ninety-three professionals present in the census. Although a doctor was named as the single largest wealth holder in the census, lawyers participated much more eagerly in the real estate market than other professionals. Physicians were more likely to leave medicine altogether rather than combining medicine with business.(30) Without question, the superior economic position of lawyers compared to the other two groups stemmed largely from their acumen and persistence as land speculators.(31)

Over the next decades, land speculation by no means ceased to be a lucrative field for daring investors. The physician Max Thorek, for instance, bought a piece of lakefront property in the 1910s in the hope that Lake Shore Drive would be expanded to the north. In the early 1920s, the drive was indeed extended, and Thorek erected a fifty-apartment building that dramatically increased his wealth.(32) Henry C. Morris, a lawyer, devoted much of his time to his various holdings in the period around 1910.(33) Yet the general importance of real estate investments as a strategy of capital accumulation declined. Private investors were replaced by real estate developers and title companies.(34) With the increasing availability of other investment forms, more and more professionals tended to invest their surplus earnings in stocks and shifted their attention to the stock market.(35) Even this strategy was not without its risks as evinced by an article in a medical journal that cautioned the physicians of the city in 1911 to avoid risky investments because a doctor "simply cannot afford to lose a cent of his hard-earned savings."(36) Under these conditions, the earnings that professionals derived from their practices remained their most important source of income and the foundation for the accumulation of wealth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Occasional surviving account books and other sources offer some insight into the financial dynamics of professional practice around 1900. When Dr. James B. Herrick, who graduated from Rush Medical College in 1888, opened up his own practice in 1890, he experienced instant success. He recorded an annual income of $2,846, a figure that reached $4,821 in 1893. In addition, his outstanding bills could total between 50-80% of his annual earnings.(37) Herrick's excellent connections to some members of the medical establishment facilitated his start in private practice.(38) Other physicians were not as fortunate. Although Howard T. Ricketts, a medical student at the Chicago Medical College from 1895-1897, eagerly sought contacts to established practitioners, believing that "if I can keep up those acquaintances with the doctors, they might help me later,"(39) he often was discouraged by the limited financial prospects of medical practice. He considered himself lucky if he would earn $1,500 per year after leaving medical school.(40) In the end Ricketts avoided private practice altogether by becoming a medical researcher at the University of Chicago.

After investing a considerable amount of time and money into their professional education, American physicians in the late 19th century could expect only a moderate income in the early phases of their careers. Ricketts hardly considered his pecuniary difficulties unusual since the career choices open to a young doctor around 1900 - in private practice, in academia, or as a subordinate in another physicians' office - did not lead to immediate material riches.(41) Instead, initial incomes were low and rose only gradually. A survey of graduates of Harvard Medical School conducted in 1914, for example, showed that practitioners in their first year received incomes between $866 and $1,237.(42) If graduates of one of the premier medical schools in America performed so poorly, one can only speculate about the economic position of the many graduates of the fly-by-night medical schools that flourished in this period.

After the Civil War, medical specialization introduced a new factor in shaping the material fortunes of American physicians. A new hierarchy of professional power, prestige, income, and institutional ties emerged that reordered the structure of opportunities among Chicago physicians.(43) General practitioners continued to flourish in the ethnic neighborhoods of the city, but specialists came to dominate and to monopolize access to hospitals and teaching positions, to leadership in professional associations, and to public respect. As early as 1881, Chicago physician A. Reeves Jackson commented that the "old-time infallibility and influence of the 'family doctor' are, in the large cities especially, fast passing away" because specialists took on more importance.(44) The Chicago Medical Society eagerly supported the formation of sections of medical specialists within the association as early as 1874.(45) In the following decades, a large number of these sections surfaced to serve the needs of an increasingly differentiated medical profession.(46)

In becoming medical specialists, physicians rapidly increased their earnings potential. Jackson's practice, for instance, "was very lucrative but not very laborious; for he purposely limited it by keeping his fees so high as to discourage the patronage of any but well-to-do patients. His clientele was drawn, in part, from the wealthier families of the city, but chiefly from the practice of his professional brethren in this and neighboring states."(47) James Herrick also commented on the "greater financial reward" and "the greater sense of personal worth and dignity" that a specialized practice afforded.(48) Before 1900, most physicians started as general practitioners before concentrating on one specialty.(49) After the turn of the century, more and more physicians specialized while still in medical school or serving a hospital internship. Many prolonged their education by taking some form of post-graduate instruction to refine their skills in some particular field.(50) Information on the fees charged by specialists is sketchy. But the fact that Frank Billings, an internist and the foremost doctor in the city around 1900, drew up a bill over $25,000 for attending retailer Marshall Field in the last week of Field's final illness is an illustration of how medical fees had escalated.(51) In 1914, Billings reported the second-highest income among Chicago doctors, over $28,000. Only J.B. Murphy, a brilliant and publicity-seeking surgeon, earned more, over $80,000.(52) No general practitioner could match these figures. By 1920, only a small proportion of Chicago physicians had become specialists, probably not exceeding 10-20 per cent, yet medical specialization nevertheless reshaped the career patterns, fields of practice, and the internal status hierarchy within the medical profession and elevated a small but distinct segment of physicians to positions of professional dominance.

A survey of the income situation of Chicago physicians, conducted by the Health Insurance Commission of Illinois in 1919, offers some additional data on the socioeconomic stratification of the medical profession (table 3). Earnings had certainly risen since 1900, but they remained highly unevenly distributed and limited for many practitioners. Because the survey was based on information provided by members of the Illinois State Medical Society, the figures tended to inflate the actual income of the medical profession. Interestingly, physicians in Chicago were less well-off than their colleagues in medium-sized Illinois towns. A locale like Chicago contained a fairly large number of well-to-do medical specialists and surgeons, but it also attracted substantial groups of physicians practicing on the medical fringe: individuals with diplomas from questionable medical schools, charlatans and frauds offering all kinds of medical miracles, and struggling ethnic doctors who catered to specific ethnic clienteles. Larger cities thus incorporated greater extremes in medical earnings.(53)

Estimates on medical incomes in other cities confirm the findings for Chicago.(54) One contemporary observer calculated that the average income of the city physician was $2,000, compared to only $1,200 for his rural counterpart. "Thousands of young men spring into the arena," this physician complained, "already crowded to suffocation, untutored, unlearned, uncultivated, and in a swarming host infest our land with their stupidity or knavery."(55) Looking at all these figures, one can estimate that most physicians around 1900 earned between $1,000 and $2,000, an income level that was clearly higher than the wages of most white-collar workers, but hardly allowed for a life of luxury.(56) As such, the level of economic stratification uncovered in the 1870 census data persisted over the next decades. In Chicago and other cities, a small medical elite was able to claim high compensation from their practices while a large group of practitioners struggled financially. If anything, the advent of modem medicine with its level of specialization only exacerbated existing inequalities by creating distinct medical markets.

Table 3
Gross Income Levels of Chicago Physicians in 1919

Income ($)

[less than]1000               5.6% (N = 43)
1000-2000                    14.1% (N = 107)
2000-3000                    17.2% (N = 131)
3000-5000                    31.0% (N = 236)
5000-9000                    21.7% (N = 165)
9000-16,000                   8.3% (N = 63)
[greater than] 16,000         2.1% (N = 16)

Total                       100.0% (N = 764)

Source: Report of the Health Insurance Commission of the State Of
Illinois (Springfield, 1919), 79.

The differences between the incomes of the top stratum of professionals and the majority of practitioners were even more pronounced in law. The emergence of corporate law produced a segment of the profession that received compensation far beyond that attainable by personal client lawyers. The dimensions of income inequality in the profession can be illustrated by contrasting the experiences of some family lawyers with those active in the business field. George E. Dawson functioned primarily as an office lawyer in the general area of wills and estates. In 1887, he had an income of about $3,000. In the next years, however, his income seems to have stagnated. In a number of diary entries between 1898 and 1905, Dawson complained repeatedly about the lack of business. The yearly receipts of his law practice hovered around $3,000, barely enough to cover the living expenses of his family.(57) Despite his vows "to do something actively in the way of getting new business," only an upturn in the Chicago real estate market in 1903 enabled him to sell some property and to improve the financial condition of his family.(58) William E. Dever, a lawyer who also sat on the City Council and later became mayor of Chicago, likewise served a family clientele in such issues as land transactions and the drawing of wills. Between 1905 and 1909, his account books record an annual income between roughly $3,000 and $7,000.(59) These two practitioners represented the broad spectrum of moderately-successful professionals in Chicago who did not accumulate great wealth, at least not at that stage of their careers, but enjoyed some economic success.

Their success, however, pales in comparison to the incomes of corporate lawyers. Henry S. Robbins was such an attorney. Robbins started working as the official attorney for the Chicago Board of Trade in 1898 and also served a variety of other corporate interests in the next decades, in the process becoming one of Chicago's premier corporate lawyers. He kept a remarkably well-organized set of account books that testify to the meticulous methods by which he ran his business. Between 1898 and 1918, the profits generated by his firm never fell below $10,000 annually, and they reached almost $50,000 in some periods. They averaged about $30,000 per year.(60) Robbins served a very different kind of clientele and was much more dependent on a few clients whose fees constituted the mainstay of his firm. In 1905, for instance, almost a third of the intake of his office came from one source: a fee of over $15,000 that he received from the Board of Trade for representing it in two cases before the Illinois Supreme Court.(61) The situation was even more extreme in 1907 and 1908. In these two years, almost two-thirds of his total fees came from the North and West Chicago Street Railway Companies whom he represented in lengthy traction litigation cases. While this is an extreme case, Robbins' practice was much more vulnerable to the impact of the loss of just a few clients.(62) The precipitous drop in the overall volume of his business between 1913 and 1915, when his income was reduced by 70 per cent within the span of a single year, makes this very evident. But this risk was more than offset by the high fees of corporate attorneys. Robbins' career provides ample testimony for the restructuring of the Chicago bar in the wake of the corporate revolution in American business that elevated a new breed of attorney to elite status.

Other corporate lawyers experienced a similar level of economic success. The spectacular career of Levy Mayer, the son of a German-Jewish merchant who started his practice in Chicago in 1879 and soon specialized in corporate law, formed a Chicago success story. The attorney for the Chicago meat packers, he reported a taxable income of $225,750 in 1914, the highest income of any Chicago professional.(63) Another Chicago lawyer, Albert M. Kales, who also specialized in corporate law, earned $27,750 in 1919 and $30,000 in 1920.(64) These examples illustrate the level of income lawyers at the top of the profession could hope to achieve as well as the profound impact corporate law had on the development of legal compensation. Lawyers no longer were dependent upon returns from real estate investments if they were to enjoy high levels of income. Legal fees alone could provide the means to accumulate substantial capital.(65)

For the majority of lawyers in the city, however, the experiences of corporate attorneys did not reflect typical conditions of legal practice. For them the complaint of George Dawson in the year 1898 was more characteristic: "Business is still quiet indeed. Very little new matters coming in and were it not that there have been such periods before I should begin to feel discouraged about the outlook."(66) Most lawyers in the city might have enjoyed an income superior to that of physicians and engineers, but the vast majority were situated in the range between $2,000-4,000.(67) Data from other cities are generally consistent with these estimates.(68) Finally, a 1914 survey of the fate of lawyers trained at Harvard, comparable to the survey of medical graduates documented previously, showed that they earned $664 on the average in their first year of practice, an amount that increased to $5,325 in the tenth year. Lawyers started out receiving slightly less compensation than physicians, but surpassed them by more than $1,500 after ten years.(69) Yet for the majority of practitioners in both occupations material prosperity could only be achieved through consistent efforts in a very competitive marketplace.

Engineers faced a very different economic environment. Instead of relying on academic credentials, professional expertise, and social contacts to attract clients, the overwhelming number of American engineers around 1900 worked as salaried employees in industrial corporations. Dependence on professional markets was replaced by dependence on impersonal labor markets and the whim of their employers. As one engineer explained in 1888 with regard to overcrowding in the profession: "Engineering is especially afflicted in this way because there are more 'ups and downs' in it than in most other professions. The demand for doctors, lawyers, and ministers is relatively constant. Even architects are not subject to great fluctuations. But to give a man employment as a civil engineer, some one must be spending a good deal of money, most of which in the form of permanent investments."(70) Engineering had to submit "to the inexorable law of trade, of demand and supply,"(71) a situation that often conflicted with the self-image of engineers as professionals. In addition, the occupation was divided internally into independent consulting engineers, engineers who owned industrial firms, and the rank-and-file of salaried engineers. As a result, "engineers..., in their early years always, and sometimes all their life, are in the employ of other engineers, and this brings up the eternally disturbing relation of master and servant."(72) Caught between a capitalist market for their services and standards of professional conduct, American engineers were often at a loss to develop effective strategies to improve their economic situation.(73)

Because of the functional diversity of the profession and its many different ranks, it is very difficult to arrive at any generalization about the average earnings of engineers during this period. Engineers employed by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad during the 1880s and 1890s, to take one example, earned on the average between $1,000-6,000. In 1884, the consulting engineer of the corporation received an annual salary of $6,000, while the lowest-paid group of engineers made less than $800 per year. The majority of engineers of the railroad, which could offer employment to between ten and twenty engineers in any given year, earned between $1,500-2,000 per annum.(74) In a survey of the more than six thousand members of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1917, the average income of this group stood at $3,985 per year. The incomes ranged between $1,800 for those in their first year of practice to $8,000 for those with between 20-25 years of experience. But the committee that presented this report readily acknowledged that it hardly reflected the true economic situation of the profession. "It will be readily agreed, however, that the average earnings of the 40,000 to 50,000 civil engineers in the United States are very much lower than the earnings of the reporting members of the American Society of Civil Engineers."(75)

Other surveys registered an equal range in engineering incomes.(76) In 1912, assistant engineers in the employ of the city of Chicago cleared about $2,100, and full engineers between $3,000-5,000.(77) Even consulting engineers never earned the same incomes as leading lawyers and physicians. One can estimate that the majority of salaried engineers earned between $1,000-2,000 around 1910, a figure slightly below the remuneration of most lawyers and-physicians.(78) Engineers were acutely aware of this discrepancy. As one noted in 1913: "In contrast with the fees of famous lawyers and physicians, it may be said that the engineer's fee is always weighed, measured, and parted with reluctantly by the client."(79) Instead of being treated with respect and deference by grateful clients, engineers had to cope with employers who were often unwilling to acknowledge the importance of engineering expertise.

This situation proved especially frustrating for young engineers who had only limited prospects for upward mobility. Older engineers had long sought to allay the frustrations of their young colleagues by reassuring them that "the opportunity, not the salary, should be the goal" connected with their first position.(80) But more and more engineers became convinced that their low positions were of a permanent character. Even some established engineers began to concede that American industry was now looking for individuals "who are willing to do the same thing over and over again every day of their lives."(81) The expansion of the manufacturing base of the country expanded the ranks of subordinate engineers much more rapidly than the number of positions of real authority. Engineers were thus forced to conclude "that the engineering profession is not composed of generals and lieutenants, but is a regular army of privates and officers of all ranks; that the private and petty officers have little or no chance to become generals."(82) Unlike independent professionals, most engineers could only improve their economic lot through promotions inside a corporate hierarchy.(83) In this context, trade unionism seemed to offer an avenue of collective action.

Various engineers had debated the role that engineering associations could play in raising the economic condition of the profession even earlier but most had rejected such methods as smacking of labor unionism.(84) But by 1909, some engineers realized that their problems had been neglected by the established organizations. "The men on the lower rungs of the ladder feel that they cannot get the proper recognition in this higher class of societies because such societies are always managed by the employing class, so they propose a union of their own which will force recognition."(85) In Chicago, a group of young city engineers founded the American Association of Engineers devoted to the promotion of the economic interests of the profession in 1915. Similar associations were also founded in other localities.(86) The tide of engineering discontent reached a crescendo during World War I when wartime inflation further eroded engineering incomes. The pages of engineering journals from 1917 to 1920 were filled with complaints about the low income of engineers. While few advocated outright labor unionism, many looked toward engineering associations as instruments to improve their situation.(87) Local associations in Chicago certainly tried to organize engineers collectively.(88) None of these organizational movements survived the aftermath of the war. After the failure of the national strike wave in 1919 and amidst the Red Scare, most American engineers turned away from everything that could be associated with trade unionism. But the brief flirtation with attempts to protect the engineer as wage-earner illustrates the profoundly distinctive economic environment encountered by American engineers.

The evidence on professional incomes and wealth after 1870 proffered so far is largely impressionistic. One other source, however, the returns of the federal income tax, allows a more general analysis. In 1914, the tax laws exempted any married individual earning less than $4,000 per year from paying any tax.(89) In comparing the individuals listed in the tax returns for Chicago in 1914 with a list of professionals practicing in the city gleaned from the city directory, one finds that most professionals earned less than $4,000. About 15 per cent of attorneys paid taxes, compared to 9 per cent of the members of the medical profession and only a handful of engineers. Lawyers also recorded a higher average income, $9,164, while the one of doctors stood at $5,538. Almost one-third of the attorneys paying taxes earned more than $5,000 per year; only 20 per cent of physicians did the same.(90) Although the income tax returns do not afford a detailed investigation of professional incomes, they confirm the presence of a professional elite that received substantial earnings from their practices. The vast majority of lawyers, physicians, and engineers, by contrast, did only moderately well economically.(91) In addition to the significant levels of intra-occupational stratification, the three groups were also arranged in a hierarchy of material resources that placed lawyers above physicians and engineers.

Lawyers, physicians, and engineers in Chicago formed very diverse occupations. From the ethnic doctor practicing out of his home in a working-class neighborhood to the downtown specialist, from the marginalized divorce lawyer to the corporate attorney lunching with his business clients in an exclusive club, from the consulting engineers advising the city on complex infrastructural projects to the mass of salaried engineers with few prospects of upward mobility: few other occupations in America encompassed the same variety of market positions, work settings, economic fortunes, and life-styles as the professions. Few professionals were poor. Most earned substantially more than white-collar workers and had much better chances to increase their compensation.(92) The three groups analyzed here also usually had higher incomes than other professional groups such as college professors and teachers.(93) But the general prosperity of the professions could not mask a very uneven distribution of the overall material resources available to the occupations. Most practitioners had to struggle hard to achieve moderate levels of success, and only few attained the lofty levels occupied by some medical specialists and corporate lawyers. If anything, the increasing segmentation of career patterns and the rising importance of academic credentials and institutional ties hardened inequality within the professions.

The only moderate levels of economic success achieved by the majority of professionals in Chicago may force historians and sociologists to rethink some of the currently accepted interpretations of professionalization around 1900. In the last few decades, scholars have portrayed the professions as seeking to acquire market power through a series of monopolization strategies.(94) If the Chicago data are any indication of nationwide trends, as seems likely, the professions hardly achieved their goals by 1920. It is one thing to assert that the professions managed to largely monopolize markets for their services and to eliminate less-qualified rivals, as was indisputably the case; the impact on professional incomes is far less certain. As long as competition among professionals remained intense, mechanisms existed to differentiate levels of material remuneration quite sharply. The impressive earnings of a select few should not blind the observer to the insecure economic position of most professionals. It is also important to carefully distinguish among different occupations. The professions did not follow a uniform upward trajectory towards material prosperity and social prestige. The older professions composed primarily of independent practitioners did noticeably better than newer groups that often contained large numbers of salaried employees. The uneasiness about their economic situation felt by many professionals around 1900 thus accurately reflected the limited rewards and perils of professional practice.

Yet economic inequality within expert occupations constituted only one facet of the fragmented nature of the professions in modem America. The professions were highly heterogeneous occupations, composed of competing segments that stood to benefit in very unequal fashion from the effects of professionalization. In this, the Chicago data provide historical background and texture to the contemporary sociologists who have examined the striking diversity of the professions in America. In their magisterial analysis of the contemporary Chicago bar, for instance, John Heinz and Edward Laumann have traced the fundamental divide between corporate attorneys and personal client lawyers that fragments the legal profession.(95) Other scholars have made similar observations.(96) Despite some basic similarities in the cognitive base of their work and in the settings and organizational parameters of the performance of professionals, the modern professions consist of a variety of often competing segments that offer highly uneven rewards to the practitioners.(97) The processes that would divide professional occupations, especially client orientation and knowledge specialization, were already visible around 1900. The material rewards of professional practice, because they formed such an obvious yardstick to measure occupational success, constantly acted to erode the visions of professionalism articulated by professional elites. If the American professions were indeed as intent on securing market power through monopolization strategies as recent scholarship suggests, it did not signal occupational strength but rather their fundamental weakness in coping with the economic effects of a competitive market place.(98)

But the Chicago findings also raise some questions about the general position of the professions within the American social structure. A number of scholars have recently advanced the concept of a distinct American middle class that formed in the 19th century around a set of cultural values, family practices, residential locations, and patterns of consumption.(99) The professions are usually situated squarely within this new social formation. Despite these attempts at a definition of the middle class, however,(100) the explanatory potential of the term has yet to be established. Clearly, the middle class is not a class in a Marxist or Weberian sense. Economic interest or market position cannot be used to describe a group as diverse as the 'middle class.' The evidence on the highly differentiated rewards of professional labor, coupled with occupational diversity in many other areas, underlines this point.

That is why historians have invoked concepts of a common middle-class culture in their search for the integrative mechanisms that held this cluster of variegated occupations together. The data offered in this essay do not, of course, speak directly to this point. They underscore the need for further research on the private lives of professionals and their families. But if professionals developed similar life-styles and patterns of consumption and shared in similar values, they did so not as members of specific occupations but as members of religious and ethnic groups, as possessors of specific levels of cultural and social capital,(101) and as members of voluntary associations and neighborhoods. Whether one should employ a term such as class that is so laden with economic connotations, that was originally developed to privilege the area of economics as the guiding force of human action, and that has had such a contentious history, to delineate an essentially cultural formation, one can seriously debate. If historians do not describe ethnic and religions groupings in class terms, and with good reason, why do it in the case of a 'middle class' where the linkages between economic position and values and behavior are equally hard to find? This article can hardly resolve this issue - although one can advance good arguments for a more restrictive and precise usage of class terminology - but it can be demonstrated that class is of little help in analyzing the occupational behavior of American professionals. In contrast, occupational distinctions and location within an occupational hierarchy organized the social map of American professionals around 1900.

The dialectic of more distinct outer boundaries combined with increasing internal segmentation had far-reaching repercussions for the mentalities and patterns of behavior among American professionals. To eliminate less-qualified competitors and to impress their demands for respect and influence on the public, but also to provide mechanisms of integration able to cope with the centrifugal forces at work in expert vocations, professionals searched for a matrix of ideas and concepts that would establish a sense of identity and purpose for highly diverse occupational communities. One should look for the formation of what one might call 'occupational consciousness' and the collective representations of professional work that undergirded them.(102) In these constructs, one can find the factors that shaped the world-views and collective habits of professionals in Chicago and elsewhere. Not in vague assertions of the essentially middle-class nature of expert vocations, so devoid of content and explanatory power, but in the specific strategies designed to cope with the task of gaining positions of influence can we find the dynamics of professional evolution between 1870 and 1920.

Fundamentally, one can speculate that the professions represented a new type of occupation, built around specialized knowledge and educational credentials, backed by licensing, incorporating diverse segments of practitioners, and emphasizing the importance of occupational demarcations. New lines of social distinction appeared in the fabric of American society, it is possible to argue, lines that had little to do with class differences but originated in occupational distinctions. As trailblazers in this process, the professions epitomized a new patterning of inequality in American history.(103) Yet, ironically, the new emphasis on occupational distinctions - an emphasis that pervaded all aspects of professionalization, which almost universally revolved around the construction of instruments and symbols to differentiate duly-qualified practitioners from a motley array of so-called charlatans, frauds, and imposters that continually sought to breach the lines of defense erected by the professions - went hand in hand with a growing institutionalization of intra-professional differences, with the proliferation of specific career tracks, and an increasing recognition of professional segments. The defining power of occupational titles and professional heterogeneity expanded simultaneously, existing in an uneasy tension that makes the structure of the professions so complex and multi-faceted. The result was the construction of modern occupational communities that rank practitioners according to a variety of competing principles of division and that are shaped by the distribution of forms of capital among members that share occupational titles, while concurrently distinguishing themselves from one another through their location in intricate occupational hierarchies.

John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies Lansstr 5-9. 14195 Berlin Germany

ENDNOTES

1. Transactions of the Illinois State Medical Society (1879): 232.

2. For complaints by doctors see e.g., "Survival of the Fittest," Chicago Medical Journal and Examiner 36 (1878): 186-190; George N. Krieder, "Education Preliminary to the Study of Medicine," Transactions of the Illinois State Medical Society (1885): 286; Bulletin of the Chicago Medical Society 14, No. 12, (Nov. 21, 1914): 10; G. Frank Lydston, Medicine as a Business Proposition (Chicago, 1900), 4-5; "A Plea for the Country Practitioner," Corpuscle 1, No. 5 (Dec. 1891): 75-76; James B. Herrick, "The Passing of the Family Doctor," Address before the Presbyterian Hospital Board of Lady Managers, Jan. 9, 1922, 4-5, Herrick Papers, Box 14, Folder 2, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago; How to be Successful as a Physician. Heart-to-Heart Talks of a Successful Physician with his Professional Brothers (Meridan, 1902), 18-19; "A New Field for the College," JAMA 23, No. 19 (Nov. 19, 1894): 729-730; Perry H. Minara; "The Propriety and Necessity of State Regulation of Medical Practice," ibid. 9, No. 16 (Oct. 1887): 491-493; Charles Phelps, "The Causes of a Decline in the Average Income of General Practitioners of Medicine," Transactions of the New York Sate Medical Association 14 (1897): 21-3; Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1880 (Washington, D.C., 1882), CLV; C.H. Reed, "Why is the Profession Poor in Purse? And How to Remedy It," JAMA 32, No. 18 (May 6, 1899): 975-977. On lawyers see "Attorney Fees," Chicago Legal News 1, No. 20 (Feb. 13, 1869): 156. See also ibid, 28, No. 20 (Jan. 11, 1896): 325; "American Lawyer Crop," Scientific American 77, No. 12 (Sept. 18, 1897): 186; "Current Topics," Central Law Journal 16 (March 23, 1883): 221.

3. See e.g. Samuel Haber, The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions, 1759-1900 (Chicago, 1991); Magali S. Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, 1977); Nathan O. Hatch, ed., The Professions in American History (Notre Dame, 1988).

4. R. Murphy, Social Closure: The Theory of Monopolization and Exclusion (Oxford, 1988); Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (New York, 1976); Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988); Larson, The Rise of Professionalism.

5. The most important books among the large literature are William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore, 1972); id., American Medical Schools and the Practice of Medicine: A History (New York, 1987); Rosemary Stevens, American Medicine and the Public Interest (New Haven, 1971); James G. Burrow, Organized Medicine in the Progressive Era: The Move toward Monopoly (Baltimore, 1977); id, AMA: Voice of American Medicine (Baltimore, 1963); John H. Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885 (Cambridge, MA, 1986); Jeffrey L. Berlant, Profession and Monopoly: A Study of Medicine in the United States and Great Britain (Berkeley, 1975); David Rosner, A Once Charitable Enterprise: Hospitals and Health Care in Brooklyn and New York, 1885-1915 (Cambridge, 1982); Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital System (New York, 1987); Maxwell H. Bloomfield, American Lawyers in a Changing Society, 1776-1876 (Cambridge, MA, 1976); Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, 1983); Gerald W. Gawalt, ed., The New High Priests: Lawyers in Post-Civil War America (Westport, 1984); Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York, 1973); Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York, 1992); Daniel H. Calhoun, The American Civil Engineer: Origins and Conflict (Cambridge, MA, 1960); Monte A. Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer in America: 1830-1910; Professional Cultures in Conflict (Baltimore, 1967); David F. Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Oxford, 1977); Edwin T. Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland, 1971).

6. See, for instance, Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis (Cambridge, MA, 1973); id. and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History (New Haven, 1969); Clyde and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Poughkeepsie (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stem, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA, 1982); Howard P. Chudacoff, Mobile Americans: Residential and Social Mobility in Omaha, 1880-1920 (New York, 1972).

7. The study is largely based on three distinct samples of professionals. The federal census schedules for 1870 yielded information on the roughly 1,500 lawyers, doctors, and engineers residing in Chicago at that point. For 1910, every second enumeration district for the city and selected suburbs was analyzed, providing a list of about 5,000 individuals. Biographical information on almost 2,500 professionals was obtained by examining numerous Chicago 'mug-books' as well as other biographical sources. When possible, these data sets were supplemented with information drawn from city directories, Chicago real estate evaluation books, and the schedules of the 1913 federal income tax for Chicago. Though not complete, these samples offer the most comprehensive data base on the social history of professionals in this period yet established.

8. See, for instance, William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991); Frederic C. Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana, 1982), 453-575.

9. Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago, 1991), 250. See also Edward C. Bubnys, "Chicago, 1870 and 1900: Wealth, Occupation, and Education" (Ph.D. Diss., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1978), 154. On wealth distribution in Chicago prior to 1870 compare Craig Buettinger, "Economic Inequality in Early Chicago, 1849-1850," Journal of Social History 11, No. 3 (Spring 1978): 413-418.

10. Deborah L. Haines, "City Doctor, City Lawyer: The Learned Professions in Frontier Chicago, 1833-1860" (Ph.D. Diss., The University of Chicago, 1986), 252-253, 276-277, 472; E. Brooks Holifield, "The Wealth of Nineteenth-Century Physicians," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64, No. 1 (Spring 1990): 79-85; Gerald W. Gawalt, The Impact of Industrialization on the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1870-1900, in id., ed., The New High Priests, 116; Edward C. Atwater, "The Medical Profession in a New Society, Rochester, New York (1811-1860)," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 47, No. 3 (May-June 1973): 229; Charles E. Rosenberg, "The Practice of Medicine in New York a Century Ago," ibid. 41, No. 3 (May-June 1967): 223-253, 229; Leo O. O'Hara, "An Emerging Profession: Philadelphia Medicine 1860-1900" (Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1976), 33; Clyde and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers, 96-99; Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth in the United States: 1850-1870 (New Haven, 1975), 22-23. For other figures on 19th-century patterns of wealth holding see Clayne L. Pope, "Households on the American Frontier: The Distribution of Wealth and Income, 1850-1900," in David W. Galenson, ed., Markets in History: Economic Studies of the Past (Cambridge, 1989), 148-189.

11. David W. Galenson," Economic Opportunity on the Urban Frontier: Nativity, Work, and Wealth in Early Chicago," Journal of Economic History 51, No 3 (Sept. 1991): 581-603.

12. Age only had a Beta coefficient of .11 in the case of personal wealth and of .07 in the case of real wealth, coefficients that correspond almost exactly to the ones found for the variable occupation. The coefficients for ethnicity were not statistically significant.

13. Unfortunately, it was not possible to study the interaction between variables such as occupation of father and religion and property ownership. Too few individuals in the 1870 census could be linked to the biographical sample to allow for a meaningful statistical analysis.

14. On patterns of servant employment see Katz, et al., The Social Organization, 8689; Claudette Lacelle, Urban Domestic Servants in 19th-Century Canada (Quebec, 1987), 81-86; Fay Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, 1983); Daniel E. Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States, 1800-1920 (Baton Rouge, 1981).

15. The analysis is based on the assumption that the divergent values of real estate across Chicago tended to influence the prices of houses and rents in an equal fashion. While this hypothesis is impossible to test, there is no reason to believe that the mechanics of the real estate market affected these two areas differently. As a general indicator of the socioeconomic standing of an individual, the usage of real estate values thus seems justified.

16. Even if one restricts the analysis to the professionals who were listed as heads of households, the differences between the three groups persist. Of this group, 44% of the lawyers, 36% of the doctors, and 26.2% of the engineers owned their residence.

17. Thirteenth Census of the United States, Vol. I, Population: General Report and Analysis (Washington, D.C., 1913), 1295, 1313. For information on the proportion of houses owned in various American cities between 1890 and 1930, see Robert G. Barrows, "Beyond the Tenement: Patterns of American Urban Housing, 1870-1930," Journal of Urban History 9, No. 4 (Aug. 1983): 395-420, 416.

18. See e.g. John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Urbana, 1982), 156-158; Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, 1977), 175. For a different interpretation of working-class home ownership see Daniel D. Luria, "Wealth, Capital, and Power: The Social Meaning of Home Ownership," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7, No. 2 (Autumn 1976): 262-282.

19. Katz et al., The Social Organization, 147; Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago, 1982), 153; David Hogan, "Education and the Making of the Chicago Working Class, 1880-1930," History of Education Quarterly 18, No. 3 (Fall 1978): 227-270, 242; Margaret Marsh, Suburban Lives (New Brunswick, 1990); Joel Perlmann, "Working-Class Homeownership and Children's Schooling in Providence, Rhode Island, 1880-1925," History of Education Quarterly 23, No. 2 (Summer 1983): 175-193, 180. See also Eva Morawska, For Bread with Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890-1940 (Cambridge, 1985), 146-149.

20. According to the census schedules in 1910, 4.4% of Chicago engineers had experienced a stint of unemployment in the preceding year; the same was true for only 0.2% of lawyers and 0.5% of physicians.

21. David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York, 1978), 56, 61; Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants, 183-184; Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Philadelphia, 1989); Stephen Gross, "Domestic Labor as a Life-Course Event: The Effects of Ethnicity in Turn-of-the-Century America," Social Science History 15, No. 3 (Fall 1991): 397-416.

22. George E. Dawson to Eva Dawson, July 13, 1904, Dawson Papers, Newberry Library.

23. Anne Dudley to Emilius C. Dudley, July 19, 19?, Emilius C. Dudley Scrapbooks, Northwestern University Medical School Library, Chicago.

24. See William T. Bielby and A.L. Kalleberg, "The Structure of Occupational Inequality," Quality and Quantity 15, No. 2 (Apr. 1981): 138; John B. Cullen, Professional Differentiation and Occupational Earnings," Work and Occupations 12, No. 3 (Aug. 1985): 368; Walter Fogel, Occupational Earnings: Market and Institutional Influences," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 33, No. 1 (Oct. 1979): 34-35; Christopher Jenks et al., "What is a Good Job? A New Measure for Labor-Market Success," American Journal of Sociology 93, No. 6 (Summer 1988): 1325-1328; Kathryn M. Langwell, "Factors Affecting the Incomes of Men and Women Physicians: Further Explanations," Journal of Human Resources 17, No. 2 (Spring 1982): 264; Jon Lorence, "Intraoccupational Earnings Inequality: Human Capital and Institutional Determinants," Work and Occupations 14, No. 2 (May 1987): 237; Joe L. Spaeth, "Vertical Differentiation among Occupations," Americans Sociological Review 44, No. 5 (Oct. 1979): 758.

25. James E. Rosenbaum, "Organizational Career Mobility: Promotion Chances in a Corporation during Periods of Growth and Contraction," American Journal of Sociology 85, No. 1 (July 1979): 21-48; Richard Brown, "Work Histories, Career Strategies, and the Class Structure," in A. Giddens and G. Mackenzie, eds., Social Class and the Division of Labour (Cambridge, 1982), 119-136; Rosabeth R. Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York, 1977); R. Richard Ritti, The Engineer in the Industrial Corporation (New York, 1971); Harold L. Wilensky, "Orderly Careers and Social Participation: The Impact of Work History on Social Integration in the Middle Class," American Sociological Review 26, No. 4 (Aug. 1961): 521-529; Seymour Spilerman, "Careers, Labor Markets Structure, and Socioeconomic Achievement," American Journal of Sociology 83, No. 3 (Nov. 1977): 578-579; George A. Miller, "Professionals in Bureaucracy: Alienation among Industrial Scientists and Engineers," American Sociological Review 32, No. 5 (Oct. 1967): 766-767.

26. Nathan Smith Davis Account Book, 1867, Northwestern University Medical School Library, Chicago.

27. Harry Barnard, "Lambert Tree Esq: A Memorandum," Chicago, 1948, Lambert Tree Papers, Box 1907-1948, Newberry Library, 75; Chicago Legal New 18, No. 16, (Dec. 26, 1885): 249. As Goudy was well known for the influence he wielded in Illinois political circles, one might speculate that a part of his sizable income did not derive from any narrowly-defined legal work, but was due to the role played as a lobbyist on behalf of private business interests.

28. Carl Abbott, Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West (Westport, 1981); Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago, 1933); John D. Haeger, The Investment Frontier: New York Businessmen and the Development of the Old Northwest (Albany, 1981); Einhorn, Property Rules.

29. Willard L. King, Melville Weston Fuller: Chief Justice of the United States, 1888-1910 (New York, 1950), 63-64.

30. See e.g. Walter D. Scott, John Evans 1814-1897: An Appreciation (Evanston, 1939); Edgar S. McMechen, Life of Governor Evans, Second Territorial Governor of Colorado (Denver, 1924).

31. Even lawyers, however, did not always succeed as land speculators. John M. Wilson, for instance, lost almost his entire fortune, estimated at between $300,000-400,000, in a real estate market crash in the 1870s. See Chicago Legal News 10, No. 32 (Apr. 27, 1878): 741.

32. Max Thorek, A Surgeon's World, An Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1943), 153-155. Thorek's success as a land speculator was only temporary, though, as the Great Depression forced him to sell the building and to curtail his expenses drastically.

33. This argument is based on a survey of the business-related correspondence in the Henry C. Morris Papers, Chicago Historical Society.

34. On this topic see Ann Durkin Keating, Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis (Columbia, 1988).

35. See, for instance, Josiah Barfield to James B. Herrick, June 26, 1897; Barfield to Herrick, July 2, 1897, Herrick Papers; Loyal Davis, J. B. Murphy: Stormy Petrel of Surgery (New York, 1938), 226-227.

36. This article also reinforced the notion that doctors were especially inept investors. "In fact, we have not known any women possessed of finances to make such poor investments as the average, nay the majority of physicians." It was recommended that physicians should invest in such stable companies as railroads, municipal bonds, and meatpacking enterprises. See "Rules for Investors," Chicago Medical Recorder 33 (1911): 692, 693.

37. Ledger Books of Dr. James B. Herrick, 1891-1893, Herrick Papers, Boxes 24-25.

38. James B. Herrick, Memories of Eighty Years (Chicago, 1947), 56-62, 85, 91-92. Among his benefactors was Dr. Norman Bridge, one of his teachers at Rush. When Bridge was forced to relocate to the sunny climate of California because of pneumonia, he wrote to Herrick: "... and take care of any of my patients who in the future may send you as in a few days I leave Chicago never to come back to live here"; Herrick, "Dr. Bridge: The Friend of the Medical Student and the Young Doctor," 1923, Typewritten Manuscript, Herrick Papers, Box 7, Folder 5.

39. Howard T. Ricketts to Myra Tubbs, October 5, 1896, Howard T. Ricketts Papers, Box 2, Folder 5, Department of Special Collections, The University of Chicago. See also Ricketts to Tubbs, June 4, 1896; July 12, 1896.

40. Ricketts to Tubbs, August 28, 1895, Ricketts Papers, Box 1, Folder 10.

41. Another Chicago physician, Morris Fishbein, confronted the same problems some ten years after Ricketts. Upon receiving his M.D. in 1912, Fishbein faced a variety of choices: an assistantship with an established physician, a position in the office of the state pathologist of Wisconsin, or an assistant editorship with the journal of the AMA. Fishbein ultimately accepted the latter position though it was not the best-paid. See Morris Fishbein, Morris Fishbein, M.D.: An Autobiography (Garden City, 1969), 33-35.

42. Arthur B. Emmons, ed., The Profession of Medicine: A Collection of Letters from Graduates of the Harvard Medical School (Cambridge, MA, 1914), 60-63.

43. Sydney A. Halpern, American Pediatrics: The Social Dynamics of Professionalism, 1880-1980 (Berkeley, 1988).

44. A. Reeves Jackson, "The Present Status of Specialism in Medical and Surgical Practice," Transactions of the Illinois State Medical Society (1881): 277, 281-282, 289; Minutes of the CMS, June 16, 1909, Chicago Historical Society. The specialization of medicine was actively supported by the curriculum taught in American medical schools that emphasized specialized knowledge even though most graduates would work as general practitioners. Thorek, A Surgeon's World, 72.

45. Minutes of the CMS, Jan. 19, 1874.

46. Harry A. Paskind, "History of the Chicago Neurological Society," Bulletin of the Society of Medical History of Chicago 5, No. 4 (July 1943): 27-30; "Officers of the Branch Societies," Bulletin of the CMS 8, No. 6 (Nov. 7, 1908): 17-21.

47. William E. Quine, "Abraham Reeves Jackson," Transactions of the Illinois State Medical Society 43 (1893): 44-47, 45.

48. Herrick, "The Passing of the Family Doctor," 2.

49. See e.g. Herrick, Memories of Eight Years, 136-137.

50. Loyal Davis, A Surgeon's Odyssey (Garden City, 1973), 102-103.

51. Chicago Medical Recorder 28, (1906): 477. On Billings see William Rainey Harper to Billings, November 19, 1904, William Rainey Harper Papers Box 7, Folder 15, Department of Special Collections, The University of Chicago; Billings to Charles L. Hutchinson, December 1, 1903, Charles L. Hutchinson Papers, Box 1900-1905, Newberry Library; Edwin F. Hirsh, Frank Billings: The Architect of Medical Education, An Apostle of Excellence in Clinical Practice, A Leader in Chicago Medicine (Chicago, 1966), 29-33.

52. "Income Tax Lists for Individuals and Withholding Agents for Cook County, 1914-1917, 1914," Internal Revenue Service, Record Group 58, National Archives Chicago Branch.

53. A national investigation of the income of physicians undertaken in 1929 likewise ascertained that the doctors in large cities were situated between the poor country physicians and the medium-sized city doctors with regard to their economic situation. See Maurice Leven, The Income of Physicians: An Economic and Statistical Study (Chicago, 1932), 30.

54. Of 330 surveyed physicians in Richmond, Virginia, in 1915, for example, only about 10% reported an income over $4,000 per year, and less than 5% earned more than $6,000. See American Medical Association, Council on Health and Public Instruction, Social Insurance Series, Pamphlet No. 7, Statistics of the Medical Profession in the United States (Chicago, 1916), 81.

55. How to be Successful as a Physician, 26, 55; George F. Shrady, "Pay of Physicians and Surgeons," Forum 18 (Sept. 1894): 68.

56. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York, 1982). See also Burrow, Organized Medicine in the Progressive Era, 52.

57. Diary of George E. Dawson, Jan. 1, 1888; Jan. 12, 1898; June 24, 1898; Feb. 8, 1899; Feb 7, 1900; Sept. 20, 1900; Jan. 1, 1901; June 17, 1901; June 19, 1901; Sept. 28, 1904; Jan. 5, 1905, Dawson Papers, Newberry Library. As a consequence of Dawson's limited success, the family was even forced to let their servant go in 1899; see entry of Feb. 8, 1899.

58. Ibid., June 17, 1901 and August 6, 1903.

59. William E. Dever Account Books, 1905 to May 1909, Dever Papers, Box 10, Chicago Historical Society. On Dever's work on the city council see Harold L. Platt, The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930 (Chicago, 1991), 131-135.

60. Henry S. Robbins, Cash Account Book, 1898-1923, Robbins Papers, Microfilm Reel 3, Vol. 22, Chicago Historical Society.

61. George H. Stone to Henry S. Robbins, May 24, 1905, Robbins Papers, Box 1, Folder "1870-1923."

62. Eugene Prussing, another Chicago corporate lawyer, experienced a similar fate in the 1890s when his most important client, a bank, dropped him in favor of another attorney, causing "a great blow financially and to my self-esteem as well." See Eugene E. Prussing, "An Attempt at Autobiography," handwritten manuscript, Vol. II, 206, Prussing Papers, Newberry Library.

63. "Income Tax Lists for Individuals and Withholding Agents for Cook County, 1914-1917, 1914"; Edgar Lee Masters, Levy Mayer and the New Industrial Era: A Biography (New Haven, 1927), 24, 43-44, 46-47, 64-65, 96-100, 294-295.

64. Diary of Albert Martin Kales, 1903-1921, Entries for Jan 22, 1920 and August 29, 1921, Kales Papers, Chicago Historical Society.

65. A further impression of the fortunes of some Chicago lawyers can be obtained by looking at some of the obituaries published in the Chicago Legal News that occasionally listed data on the size of the estates of deceased attorneys, some of which ran in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. While by no means reflecting the situation of the average practitioner, these obituaries capture the wealth of the top layer of the legal community in the city. See e.g. Chicago Legal News 31, No. 11 (Nov. 5, 1898): 169 and 37, No. 30, (March 11, 1905): 473.

66. George E. Dawson to Eva Dawson, July 13, 1898, Dawson Papers.

67. If one accepts professional incomes in Wisconsin, a state which had introduced an income tax that taxed around 60% of the professionals in the state between 1914-1920 as fairly representative for the Midwest, most lawyers earned around $2,500 during this period. Physicians earned roughly $1,500 in 1914 and 1916, but increased that figure to over $2,200 in 1920. These numbers are consistent with the data on Chicago and suggest a range of compensation for the majority of lawyers and physicians in the city. Attorneys continued to be better off than doctors, although the gap may have narrowed during World War I. See American Medical Association, Council on Health and Public Instruction, Social Insurance Series, Pamphlet No. 7, 87; Eighth Biennial Report of the the Wisconsin Tax Commission (Madison, 1916), 62; Tenth Biennial Report of the Wisconsin Tax Commission (Madison, 1918), 34.

68. For data on legal incomes in other areas see Robert Silverman, Law and Urban Growth: Civil Litigation in the Boston Trial Courts, 1880-1900 (Princeton, 1981), 35-37; J. R. Oldfield, "A High and Honorable Calling: Black Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868-1915,"Journal of American Studies 23, No. 3 (Dec. 1989): 395-406, 406.

69. Emmons, The Profession of Medicine, 105; Richard Ames, "Suggestions from Law School Graduates as to Where and How to Begin Practice," Harvard Law Review 27, No. 3 (Jan. 1914): 260-267, 261-262.

70. "How to Begin in Engineering," Engineering News 19 (May 18, 1888): 385.

71. "The Outlook for Engineers," Engineering News 8 (July 23, 1881): 291; Alexander Dow, "The Position of the Engineer in Municipal Service," Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies 27 (1901): 99-111.

72. "The Engineer's Compensation and his Attitude toward the Profession," Engineering News 61 (May 20, 1909): 554; Edmund T. Perkins, "The Compensation of Engineers," Reports of the Illinois Society of Engineers and Architects 33, (1918): 144.

73. Engineers, for instance, were the only ones of the three groups that routinely complained that they ranked below white-collar workers and artisans in terms of respect and income. As a relative newcomer, the profession was acutely status-conscious and hardly certain about its professional standing. See e.g. Robert E. McMath, "Engineers, Their Relations and Standing. An Address, Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies 6 (1887): 99; "How to Begin in Engineering," Engineering News 18 (Aug. 20, 1887): 132-133; "Salaries of Engineers," ibid. 51 (March 3, 1904): 203; M. W.T., Concerning the Salaries of Engineers," ibid. 52 (July 21, 1904): 73; "The Engineer's Earning Power," ibid. 61 (March 4, 1909): 250-251; M. S. Parker, "Engineering Compensation," Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies 18 (1897): 99-103.

74. "List of Officers and Employees Receiving an Annual Salary of $1,500 or over," 1884, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Papers, 33 1880 3.2, Newberry Library; "Statement Showing Pay of Employees as of December 1884," CBQ Papers, 33 1880 3.22; "List of Officers and Employees in the C.B. & Q. System who receive a salary of $1,500 or more per annum, June 1, 1891," CBQ Papers, 33 1880 3.22; List of Officers ...," 1901, 33 1880 3.23.

75. "Average Earnings of Civil Engineers," Engineering News 77 (Jan. 4, 1917): 40-42. See also "The Compensation of Civil Engineers," ibid. 73 (Jan. 7, 1915): 34-37.

76. George A. Damon, "The Opportunities in the Electrical Business," Engineering News 51 (Apr. 7, 1904): 325-326; F. H. Newell, "Organizing a Civil Engineers Corps," ibid. 52 (July 21, 1904): 58-60; "Thirty-Three Years of the Life of a Successful Engineer," ibid. 75 (Mar. 16, 1916): 500.

77. "Classified Distribution of Salaries and Wages of the City Employees of Chicago," Engineering News 67 (May 2, 1912): 834-835.

78. "The Potential Value of our Engineering Graduates," Engineering News 71 (June 25, 1914): 1411; Harry J. Buch, "The Earnings of Technical Graduates," ibid. 72 (July 23, 1914): 210.

79. "The Status of the Engineer," Engineering News 69 (Jan. 2, 1913): 34.

80. "Sympathy for the Young Engineer and His Troubles," Engineering News 61 (Apr. 15, 1909): 418; "The Pay of Young Engineers," ibid. 18 (August 20, 1887): 132-133; More Advice to Young Engineers, ibid. 61 (May 6, 1909): 501-502.

81. W. D. Taylor, "Some Comments on our Engineering Education and the Men it Produces," Engineering News 61 (June 10, 1909): 624.

82. "More Concerning the Compensation of Engineers," Engineering News 61 (Apr. 29, 1909): 478; "Progress of Engineering Council's Compensation Committee," Engineering News-Record 82 (June 19, 1919): 1198.

83. For an example of a letter recommending pay raises for two engineers in the employ of a railroad see Henry B. Stone to C. E. Perkins, September 28, 1887, Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad Papers, 33 1880 3.22.

84. M. W. T., "Concerning the Salaries of Engineers," 73.

85. "The Engineer's Compensation and his Attitude Toward the Profession," Engineering News 61 (May 20, 1909): 554; A. B.C., "Should Civil Engineers Organize a Union," ibid. 67 (Jan. 11, 1912): 75-76; X. Y. Z., "More Concerning Engineer's Unions," ibid. 67 (Feb. 8, 1912): 258.

86. Peter Meiksins, "Professionalism and Conflict: The Case of the American Association of Engineers," Journal of Social History 19, No. 3 (Spring 1986): 403-421; Layton, The Revolt of the Engineers.

87. For examples of such complaints see "Compensation of Engineers," Engineering News-Record 81 (Nov. 7, 1918): 864; J. H. Giles, "Engineers' and Artisans' Pay," ibid. 82 (Feb. 20, 1919): 394; John M. Goodell, "More Light on Engineering Compensation," ibid. 82 (April 3, 1919): 683; C.E. Drayer, "Shall We Have a Trade Union of Professional Engineers," ibid. 82 (Feb. 20, 1919): 394-395; "A. A. E. Compensation Committee Report," ibid. 82 (May 29, 1919): 1051; F. N. Harris, "Stop College Supply of Graduate Engineers," ibid. 83 (July 17, 1919): 141; Ernest R. Taylor, "Economic Slide of Engineering Profession," ibid. 83 (August 21, 1919): 388-389; J. L. Harrison, "Blames Engineering Aristocracy for Present Status of Technical Men," ibid. 83 (Dec. 25, 1919): 1071-1072; "Fees and Services of Practicing and Consulting Engineers," ibid. 85 (Dec. 30, 1920): 1266-1267.

88. "Engineers Study Compensation," Engineering News-Record 81 (Aug. 22, 1918): 371-372; C.E. Drayer, "Opportunities for Chicago Engineers to Work Together," ibid. 82 (Feb. 13, 1919): 328; "Higher Pay for Chicago Engineers," ibid. 83 (August 7, 1919): 292; Ernest McCullough, "The Engineering Society - its Past, Present, Future Activities," Journal of the Western Society of Engineers 21 (1916): 697-708; "Technical Employees in Chicago Hear Union Leaders," Engineering News-Record 83 (Dec. 25, 1919): 1081.

89. On the federal income tax law see John F. Witte, The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax (Madison, 1985), 77, 126; John D. Buenker, The Income Tax and the Progressive Era (New York, 1985).

90. In statistics based on income tax returns prepared by the Commissioner of Internal Revenue in 1916, lawyers also reported a higher income than doctors. About 19% of the attorneys filed a tax return compared to less than 10% for physicians. See Statistics of Income. Compiled from the Returns for 1916 Under the Direction of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 65th Congress, 2nd Session, 1917-1917, House Documents Vol. 8 (Washington, D.C., 1919), 7, 114-125.

91. For some more statistics see American Medical Association, Council on Health and Public Instruction, Social Insurance Series, Pamphlet No. 7, 87; Eighth Biennial Report of the Wisconsin Tax Commission, 62; Tenth Biennial Report of the Wisconsin Tax Commission, 34.

92. On white-collar salaries see Cindy Sondik Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (New York, 1987), 20-21, 22-23, 81-86; Ileen DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh (Ithaca, 1990), 60-69; Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 227-232; Bruce Laurie, Theodore Hershberg, and George Alter, "Immigrants and Industry: The Philadelphia Experience, 1850-1880," in Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia (New York, 1981), 104-106; Roger K. Burns, "The Comparative Economic Position of Manual and White-Collar Employees," Journal of Business 27, No. 4 (Oct. 1954): 258; Lee Soltow, "Evidence of Income Inequality in the United States, 1866-1965," Journal of Economic History 29, No. 2 (June 1969): 279-286.

93. See Frank Stricker, "American Professors in the Progressive Era: Incomes, Aspirations, and Professionalism," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19, No. 2 (Fall 1988): 231-257; id., "Economic Success and Academic Professionalization: Questions from Two Decades of U.S. History (1908-1929)," Social Science History 12, No. 2 (Summer 1988): 143-170; Daniel K. Kevies, The Physicists: A History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York, 1978), 46; Guido Marx, "The Problem of the Assistant Professor," Journal of the Proceedings of the Association of American Universities 1 (1910): 17-47.

94. Murphy, Social Closure; Collins, The Credential Society.

95. John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann, Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar (Chicago, 1982).

96. Jerome E. Carlin, Lawyers on Their Own: A Study of Individual Practitioners in Chicago (New Brunswick, 1962); Jack Ladinsky, "Careers of Lawyers, Law Practice, and Legal Institutions," American Sociological Review 28, No. 1 (Feb. 1963): 47-54; Dan C. Lortie, "The Striving Young Lawyer: A Study of Early Career Differentiation in the Chicago Bar" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1958); Robert L. Nelson, Partners with Power: The Social Transformation of the Large Law Firm (Berkeley, 1988); Marc Galanter and Thomas Palay, Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm (Chicago, 1991); Terence C. Halliday, Beyond Monopoly: Lawyers, State Crises, and Professional Empowerment (Chicago, 1987); Allan M. Schwartzbaum, John H. McGrath, and Robert A. Rothman, "The Perception of Prestige Differences Among Medical Subspecialties," Social Science and Medicine 7, No. 5 (May 1973): 365-371.

97. See Rue Bucher and Anselm Strauss, "Professions as Process," American Journal of Sociology 66, No. 4 (Jan. 1961): 325-334; Andrew Abbott, "Status and Status Strain in the Professions," American Journal of Sociology 86, No. 4 (Jan. 1981): 819-835; Sidney A. Halpern, "Dynamics of Professional Control: Internal Coalitions and Crossprofessional Boundaries," American Journal of Sociology 97, No. 4 (Jan. 1992): 994-1021; Carol L. Kronus, "The Evolution of Occupational Powers: A Historical Study of Task Boundaries between Physicians and Pharmacists," Sociology of Work and Occupation 3, No. 1 (Feb. 1976): 3-37; id., "Occupational Versus Organizational Influences as Reference Group Identification: The Case of Pharmacy," ibid. 3, No. 3 (August 1976): 303-331; William J. Goode, "Encroachment, Charlatanism, and the Emerging Profession: Psychology, Sociology, and Medicine," American Sociological Review 25, No. 6 (Dec. 1960): 902-914; Ronald L. Akers and R. Quinney, "Differential Organization of Health Professions: A Comparative Analysis," American Sociological Review 33, No. 1 (Feb. 1968): 104-121; James W. Begun and Ronald C. Lippincott, "The Origins and Resolutions of Interoccupational Conflict," Work and Occupations 14, No. 3 (Aug. 1987): 375-378; T. B. Priest and Robert A. Rothmann, "Lawyers in Corporate Chief Executive Positions: A Historical Analysis of Careers," Work and Occupations 12, No. 2 (May 1985): 131-146; Alan J. Richardson, "Professionalization and Intraprofessional Competition in the Canadian Accounting Professions," Work and Occupations 14, No. 4 (Nov. 1987): 591-615; David I. Rosenstein, "Professional Encroachment: A Comparison of the Emergence of Denturists in Canada and Oregon," American Journal of Public Health 70, No. 6 (June 1980): 614-618; Robert A. Rothman, "Occupational Roles: Power and Negotiation in the Division of Labour," Sociological Quarterly 20, No. 4 (Oct. 1979): 495-515.

98. For an analysis of the attempts of Chicago physicians to improve the economic standing of their profession see Thomas Goebel, "American Medicine and the 'Organizational Synthesis'; Chicago Physicians and the Business of Medicine, 1900-1920," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68, No. 4 (Dec. 1994): 639-663.

99. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1769-1900 (New York, 1989), 12; id., "The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals," American Historical Review 90, (April 1985): 299-338; Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981); John S. Gilkeson, Jr., Middle-Class Providence, 1820-1940 (Princeton, 1986); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York, 1978); Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976).

100. See also Dale L. Johnson, Class and Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle Class (Beverly Hills, 1982); Peter Stearns, "The Middle Class: Toward a Precise Definition," Comparative Studies in History and Theory 21, No. 3 (July 1979): 377-396; Arno J. Mayer, "The Lower Middle Class as a Historical Problem," Journal of Modern History 47, No. 3 (Sept. 1975): 409-436.

101. On these terms see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA, 1984).

102. Joseph Bensman and Robert Lilienfeld, Craft and Consciousness: Occupational Technique and the Development of World Images (New York, 1973); Douglas M. Eichar, Occupation and Class Consciousness in America (New York, 1989); Corinne L. Gilb, Hidden Hierarchies: Government and the Professions (New York, 1967); William J. Goode, "Community within a Community: The Professions," American Sociological Review 22, No. 2 (Apr. 1957): 194-200; Everett C. Hughes, Men and Their Work (New York, 1958); Elliott A. Krause, The Sociology of Occupations (Boston, 1971), 85; Edward O. Laumann, Prestige and Association in an Urban Community: An Analysis of an Urban Stratification System (New York, 1966).

103. See e.g. Richard P. Coleman and Lee Rainwater, Social Standing in America (New York, 1978) and Dennis Gilbert and Joseph A. Kahl, The American Class Structure, 3rd edition (Homewood, IL, 1987).