“Growing up, I had little sense of class differences . . . I had no sense that we were poor or struggling.”
Linda Chavez, We Were Poor, But I Didn’t Know It
If you’ve read any memoirs or autobiographies by people who came up from hard times and went on to make it in the world (Chavez goes onto brag about now having four bathrooms), then you’ll readily recognize that cliche. 
Poverty’s the norm when everyone you know is poor, children take their poverty for granted, and at first it’s okay. But then people grow up. And they begin to realize that there are other people out there who aren’t poor, that there are nice things they can’t afford, that they are looked down upon for being poor. And they come to resent it.
But what if it’s not the memoir of one person? What if it’s the history book of an entire nation?
After gaining its independence in 1783, the United States was a young nation, and a poor one at that. Indeed, there was little indication at first that the U.S. would grow up and build the wealthiest and most powerful empire in world history. To the contrary, America looked very much like an 18th century version of a third world country.
This isn’t to say there weren’t wealthy people in the United States. There were. In fact, none other than George Washington was one of the wealthiest. But that just made it typical of any developing nation. The large mass
of population had limited means, while a small elite of merchants and plantation owners held the lion’s share.
However, the nation as a whole actually had very little wealth, and most of it was not in the form of money, but was tied up in land and slaves. Why? Because Great Britain had founded and used its colonies to serve the mother country. So while England had already started to industrialize, the new United States had an economy that was based on resource extraction. America exported natural resources and produced very few finished goods. For example, the U.S. had no textile factories; rather, farmers grew cotton and sold it to European industrialists who made clothing. Americans chopped down the trees, dug up the minerals, and grew the food that fed Europe’s industrial revolution. The early American economy was based on bartering and very little money actually circulated in this cash-starved nation. In short, the United States was poor.
Did Americans really know nothing else? Was it really okay?
The answers are Yes, No, Maybe, and everything in between. When you’re talking about major historical developments, nothing’s ever as simple as it might seem in one person’s feel-good memoir. Nevertheless, there are certain similarities that are interesting to consider.
While the early United States had both rich and poor people, the nation as a whole lacked wealth, so the distance between them was not so massive. There was certainly nothing so extraordinary as, say, the gap between Bill Gates and a single mom in a trailer park. In fact, wealthy people regularly interacted with those of 
lesser means precisely because the nation was poor. Rich people shopped at the same butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers as everyone else. There was no Tiffany’s or Sack’s Fifth Avenue, and there were certainly no gated communities.
Small farmers and skilled trades people, who lived what we would consider to be a very, very working class life, made up the vast majority of the population. Children worked just so families could get by. Poverty, or at least something perilously close to it, really was the norm. Yet these people did not consider themselves to be poor.
Meager lifestyles were the rule of thumb, so families that successfully supported themselves were generally seen as the backbone of American society, the salt of the earth. Indeed, the irony of wealthy slave-owner Thomas Jefferson celebrating hardworking yeoman farmers as the ultimate Americans didn’t seem so ironic or pandering back then because it wasn’t. Jefferson of course had no desire to be one of them, but he sincerely lauded them and genuinely believed they should comprise the core of the new nation.
But as the nation industrialized, urbanized, and expanded, two things happened to shake that norm. First, the wealth did not trickle down much or disburse with any equity. Rather, a small elite continued to dominate, 
and further separating themselves from the masses. For example, by 1848, a mere 4% of Bostonians owned nearly 70% of that city’s growing wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 81% owned a scant 4%.
But what disrupted the balance even more in some ways was the rise of a new middle class. In Boston’s case, that other 15%. They were closer to the poor than to the rich in terms of actual economic standing and everyday living. But they aspired to be wealthy, they often mimicked the rich, and their very existence upended the norms of poverty. And so poor people were no longer simply not rich. The rich were moving up into the stratosphere, and now the poor weren’t even middle class. And everyone knew it.
The poor were now easily identified, and they were looked down upon. America was growing up.