He may never have been a Galileo of the social firmament, but as a journalist Vance Packard is clear-eyed enough to have seen, before anybody else, that the post-World War II U.S. had got caught up in a compulsive competition for status. The proof came in The Status Seekers (1959), a dissection of those Americans who, as the author put it, were "continually straining to surround themselves with visible evidence of the superior rank they are claiming." Since that happened to include just about the entire U.S. population, the great status game, once focused, provoked a great many fears that it would damage the egalitarian ideal and hasten the evolution of sharp class lines. What none of the fearful saw was that, given the services of mass production and sustained prosperity, universal chasing after prestige would engender such a gorgeous and gaudy muddle of status symbols as to reduce the game to farce—which it has now plainly become.
Status in its diverse forms still exists, no doubt, and many an American is still out there grabbing after some of it. What makes the spectacle ridiculous now is that, except in rare cases, people who have latched onto some status cannot be sure of how to flash the news to the world, and people who are watching cannot be sure who is dramatizing what sort of status with what symbol. Order Gucci loafers and you only risk winding up shod the same way as the boy who delivers them. A Cadillac today signifies nothing about the owner except that he might well pull in at the next Burger King. Incontrovertibly, any game has been seriously maimed when you can no longer tell who is winning or losing. The status game had surely begun to turn absurd as soon as the man in the gray flannel suit began turning up in denim and sneakers—with no loss of prestige. The absurdity had clearly become utter by the year now ending: it was the year in which the President of the U.S. had to resort to the jelly bean for a symbol that set him apart from other folks.
The present symbolic muddle is enough to make one nostalgic for the good old days when everybody imagined that he could peg a person's status with only a few facts about the subject's clothes, schooling, job, neighborhood and car. The days when everybody enjoyed the habit of looking at all the artifacts of civilized existence as though they were primarily badges of rank. The days when elitist Middle Americans casually sneered at fellow citizens who lived in suburban split-level houses—which only a Rockefeller could afford today. Inflation is just one of the things that undermined the great status chase. The prior years of sustained prosperity contributed to the same end—giving people of middling status possession of most of the fashions and products (luxury gadgetry, stereos, color TV sets) that only the well-heeled could afford formerly. Then, too, the cultural conniptions of the 1960s and '70s helped subvert the rules of the status game; hell-raising youth provided adult Americans with (besides headaches) liberating proof that it is possible to have a good time while disdaining conventional symbols.