Synopses & Reviews
This proper Philadelphia story starts with the city's golden age at the close of the eighteenth century. It is a classic study of an American business aristocracy of colonial stock with Protestant affiliations as well as an analysis of how fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century family founders in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, supported various exclusive institutions that in the course of the twentieth century produced a national upper-class way of life. But as that way of life became an end of itself, instead of an effort to consolidate power and control, the upper-class outlived its function; this, argues Baltzell, is precisely what took place in the Philadelphia class system.
Philadelphia Gentlemen emphasizes that class is largely a matter of family, whereas an elite is largely a matter of individual achievement. The emphasis in Philadelphia on old classes, in contrast to the emphasis in New York and Boston on individual achievement and elite striving, helps to explain the dramatically different outcomes of ruling class domination in major centers of the Eastern Establishment. In emphasizing class membership or family prestige, the dynamics of industrial and urban life passed by rather than through Philadelphia. As a result in the race for urban preeminence, Philadelphia lost precious time and eventually lost the struggle for ruling preeminence as such.
When the book initially appeared, it was hailed by The New York Times as a very, very important book. Writing in the pages of the American Sociological Review, Seymour Martin Lipset noted that Philadelphia Gentlemen says important things about class and power in America, and says them in ways that will interest and fascinate both sociologists and laymen. And in the American Historical Review, Baltzell's book was identified simply as a gold mine of information. In short, for sociologists, historians, and those concerned with issues of culture and the economy, this is indeed a classic of modern social science.
Synopsis
Although primarily a Proper Philadelphia story that starts with the city's Golden Age at the close of the eighteenth century, this classic study of an American business aristocracy of colonial stock and Protestant (largely Episcopalian) affiliations is also an analysis of how fabulously wealthy, nineteenth-century family founders in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia supported a series of class-creating institutions outside the family. These institutions included: the New England boarding schools; Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; and urban men's clubs and suburban country clubs. They produced, in the course of the twentieth century, a national, intercity, upper-class way of life. Philadelphia Gentlemen shows how this class reached its peak of power and influence in America on the eve of the Second World War. The quantitative backbone of the book is based on the 770 Philadelphians of various class and ethnicn backgrounds listed in Who's Who in America in 1940, an index of the elite leadership structure; 226 members of this elite also came from upper-class families listed in the Social Register that year. In addition, Baltzell shows howthese upper-class members dominated the financial and business power structure of the city in 1940. Thus, although he describes the upper-class style of life in Philadelphia in fascinating detail, he constantly emphasizes that it is power and influence over the whole social structure, rather than style of life per se, that is an essential quality of a properly functioning upper class. Whenever an upper-class way of life becomes an end in itself, in other words, its usefulness is over. In an afterword, written in the 1960s and included in this edition, Baltzellshows how this is what has happened since the end of World War II.