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Class Dismissed

I think it's the divisions between groups of different classes in what are traditionally seen as universal 'movements' that really makes things interesting- I'm pretty sure I recall there being a rather unexpected to modern eyes split in the education/child labour laws campaigns between Middle Class people who thought it was a disgrace that children were in factories rather than schooling, very poor working class people who quite liked the added money coming in but wanted it to be safer for the Kids, and the agricultural communities who just sort of ignored the whole debate and carried on as before.
 
You know, having had some interest in the Alexis Toth Affair (basically an East-West ecclesiastical conflict *in 19th Century Minnesota*) this article has made me wonder whether there wasn't a class component added to to the obvious ethnoreligious one. The general stereotype of the Irish-American population of that era was of being working-class, but Irish clergy of that era, certainly most hierarchs, tended to be at least lower-middle class, while Ruthenians tended to be new working-class arrivals - miners, navvies, construction workers and so on. The prospect of Ruthenian Catholics, working-class folk, having a separate sphere from the middle-class hierarchy may have made such a breakdown if not inevitable at least likely.
 
I'm also thinking of the debate over Harvard and Affirmative Action, among Asian-Americans, where there is somewhat of a division between the priorities of wealthier, more-educated recent immigrants, and the so-called "Chinatown Asians" who are often more working-class.
 
You can usually tell who The Baddies are in period set media because they are dismissive of the lower classes. While our hero is lower class and the upper classes he befriends rarely mention it.

Sharpe is probably the go to example here, eventually they all kind of blend into one and you can work out whose going to die badly, who Sharpe will avenge, etc, etc.
 
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