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The ongoing fragmentation of America is a far cry from the experiment in democracy our forefathers envisioned, a blending of European immigrants into a unique amalgam. Many historians cite the 1782 observations of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur as the early model for pluralism: "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men," he wrote in Letters from an American Farmer. In 1835, French politician and author Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated that pluralistic ideal in his Democracy in America, writing, "Imagine, my dear friend, if you can, a society formed of all the nations in the world . . . a society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without common ideas, without a national character." Such writings created a myth of the American character even as immigrants continued to arrive. But the new nation was unable to produce an egalitarian society. Racial, economic, cultural, and religious differences were entrenched in America from its beginnings, resulting in diverse classes that remain separate and unequal to this day. Jim Crow laws exacerbated a racially divided nation. Religious discrimination created restricted neighborhoods, clubs, and schools.

But Americans have always clung to the notion of egalitarianism, and not only during times of hardship and war, when the draft united the middle class and the poor. Sociologists refer nostalgically to the 1950s as a time of cohesion, a mass market, and a common lifestyle. Following the Depression and World War II, the country entered a period of unparalleled prosperity. The GI Bill provided veterans access to higher education, opening the economic door to starter houses and cars. As men returned from the war and joined the workforce, women left the labor market to tend to home and family, creating a common realm of experience that businesses didn't ignore. Before long, a majority of Americans were reading Life, watching The Ed Sullivan Show, and driving cars made in Detroit. A 1954 nationwide poll found that Americans even agreed by a large margin on their favorite meal: fruit cup, vegetable soup, steak, French fries, peas, and apple pie ? la mode.

But the '50s era of mass culture was an aberration, and it didn't last. The '60s shattered the traditional fam ily structure. Women entered the workforce in large numbers. Divorce rates rose. The Vietnam War divided families and created a class split. And more immigrants arrived - not white Europeans, but Asians, Hispanics, and others with "alien" cultures. Soon powerful social forces added fault lines to the common ground where Americans once stood. In the 1970s, institutions like the military draft that once bridged our cultural enclaves disappeared. Others, such as public schools and labor unions, fell into disarray. By the 1980s, the two-party political system had been shredded by divisive issues - abortion, affirmative action, and welfare. Social upheavals of the current generation - suburbanization, globalization, technologies that collapse time and space - continue to dilute the notion of community based on proximity and shared concerns. Meanwhile, the diversity movement, intent on abolishing the ethnic categories on census forms, advises Americans to celebrate their differences.

As a result of these demographic and societal shifts, the mass market of the post-World War II era didn't just fade away, it shattered into niche markets. In 1974, when social-scientist-turned-marketer Jonathan Robbin founded Claritas, he identified forty "lifestyle segments" in the nation, combining zip codes with marketing research to create the PRIZM cluster system. Following the 1980 census, Claritas expanded the clusters down to the block level and adjusted the forty groups to reflect changes in demographics and product usage, dropping clusters like Ethnic Row Houses (downscale industrial areas) and Marlboro Country (midscale family farms), and picking up Gray Power (upscale retirement communities) and Black Enterprise (upper-middle-class minority neighborhoods). But experts still needed only forty clusters to accurately reflect the U.S. population profile.

That changed in 1990, following the most ambitious, far-reaching, and data-rich census ever conducted. When the Census Bureau finally released its findings, the ramifications rippled through America's political and social institutions. Congressional seats were added in eight states, including Florida, California, and Texas, and dropped in thirteen others, including New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. At Claritas, the demographic shifts revealed in the census enabled a finer segmentation of lifestyles and resulted in wholesale changes to the PRIZM system, which dropped thirteen clusters, redefined another seven, and added thirty-five new lifestyle types. When David Miller, Claritas's lead technician who oversaw the clustering process, completed the 1990s model, only twenty clusters from 1980 remained largely unchanged.

Creating a lifestyle cluster system is no mean feat. Geodemographic segmentation systems, mixing demographic information with small units of geography, begin with millions of raw statistics from census surveys. Next, the nation's households are classified into groups based on similarities - much as living things are divided by biologists into orders, families, and so on. When Claritas analysts first examined the 1990 U.S. census, they looked at the six hundred variables influencing settlement at the neighborhood level. They then came up withthirty-nine key factors in five categories to organize the neighborhoods into natural lifestyle clusters. Every census tract, block group, and zip plus 4 unit of microgeography - averaging a dozen households in 22 million postal areas - was assigned to one of the clusters.

But the basic clustering principle, that people of the same ilk flock together like birds of a feather, had a new wrinkle. The self-absorption of Americans, cocooned in their homes and immersed in their electronic gadgets, had exacerbated the lack of cohesion within each neighborhood. Nowadays, the characteristics and tastes of a community, from age and marital status to preferred political cause and brand of soda, may change block by block and house by house. Thus, while cluster systems can now distinguish the preferences of a yuppie couple from those of a comparatively nonmaterialistic family living next door, their power remains in classifying the lifestyle these people share at the neighborhood level. As in the beginning, cluster systems show how the residents of one neighborhood have a common identity. Their core truth can be simply expressed: You are like your neighbors.

Copyright © 2000 by Michael J. Weiss

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About the Author

Michael J. Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and marketing consultant. A contributing editor to the Washingtonian and Ladies' Home Journal, he has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the Newport Times, Redbook, and People. His first book, The Clustering of America, was named one of the best business books of 1988. He lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C.