In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

If refinement implies spiritual values, vulgarity might be called their _aggressive_ absence. The values need not be individually acquired. They may be traditional, unconscious. They are not necessarily linked to personal traits like morality and learning. The Negro peasant in the Alabama black belt is illiterate and often drunk. But in his native state, he draws from the soil and sky in whose cycles he is seasoned, a grace which is refinement even if it be unconscious like the grace of a flower. Perhaps he is transplanted to some crude mining suburb of Birmingham. Probably, then, he loses his refinement. But if the loss remain passive, if it be not aggressive, he is not yet vulgar. Give him now a shrewd head by means of which he pushes north and lands in Harlem. Teach him that he is a free-born, American citizen on whom it is incumbent to amuse himself in metropolitan fashion. Hand him a little money and a good dose of our contemporary eighteenth-century notion of Equality. Now, his absence of refinement will grow aggressive. He will be vulgar.

We all came from Europe with a modicum of refinement. And the collateral descendants of our forebears have it still in the mines and farms of Britain, in the towns of Germany and Italy, in the ghettos of Galicia. No natural peasant of Europe is quite without it. For this refinement is almost as widespread as vegetation-as perishable, as passive.