ABSTRACT
American social life was in a state of extreme fluidity and formlessness in the middle years of the nineteenth century. A social structure can scarcely be said to have existed. Social mobility was so great that an individual might change his social role frequently in such a way that a stable structure of social norms could not be built up. The ties of social class did not exist and the control of the primary group was broken and as yet unreplaced, at least in the frontier areas, by the control of law. The individual was largely thrown upon himself and left to his own resources.
