The prevailing ideology of the country favored equality (though, to be sure, only for whites) Americans were proud that there was a relatively small gap between rich and poor. Williamson, the share of national income going to the richest one per cent of the population was more than twenty per cent in Britain but below ten per cent in America. According to “ Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700,” by the economic historians Peter H. There were rich people, but they weren’t super-rich, like European aristocrats. Wages in the young nation were higher than in Europe, and land in the West was abundant and cheap. The United States was the world’s most egalitarian society. It was, at the time, an accurate assessment. For example, Tocqueville, who was the youngest son of a count, was deeply impressed by how equal the economic conditions in the United States were.

Many of the observations have weathered well (he noted, for instance, how American individualism coexisted with conformism). On his return to France, he wrote a book about his observations, “ Democracy in America,” the first volume of which was published in 1835. He spent ten months in the United States, dutifully visiting prisons and meeting hundreds of people, including President Andrew Jackson and his predecessor, John Quincy Adams.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, at the age of twenty-five, was sent by France’s Ministry of Justice to study the American penal system.

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