Baltzell traces the differences in class authority and leadership in Boston and Philadelphia to the contrasting values of the Puritan founders of the Bay Colony and the Quaker founders of the City of Brotherly Love.
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 i...
The American upper class has become less like an aristocracy governing and guiding the nation and more like a caste, a privileged and closed body whose contribution to national leadership has steadily declined. Baltzell's theory of the structure and function of the establishment remains unique in the literature of class stratification and authority.
