Philadelphia Gentlemen

The Making of a National Upper Class

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.

“Writing both as a Philadelphian and a sociologist, Mr, Baltzell has dissected the upper-class structure of his native city with results as fascinating as they are illuminating.”—John Barkham, Saturday Review Syndicate

“In constructing a picture of the proper Philadelphian. Baltzell has made use of masses of printed material and some manuscript sources, there is little on Philadelphia and Philadelphia families which he has neglected....a gold mine of information.”—American Historical Review

“Philadelphia Gentlemen says important things about class and power in America, and says it in ways that will interest and fascinate; both sociologists and laymen.”—Seymour Martin Lipset

“This is a very, very important book.”—The New York Times Book Review