This is a classic study of Philadelphia's business aristocracy of colonial stock with Protestant affiliations. It is also an analysis of how fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century family founders produced a national upper-class way of life. But as that way of life came to an end, the upper-class outlived its function; this, argues E. Digby Baltzell, is precisely what took place in the Philadelphia class system. For sociologists, historians, and those concerned with issues of culture and the economy, this is indeed a classic of modern social science.

Based on the biographies of some three hundred people in each city, this book shows how such distinguished Boston families as the Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Peabodys have produced many generations of men and women who have made major contributions to the intellectual, educational, and political life of their state and nation. At the same time, comparable Philadelphia families such as the Biddles, Cadwaladers, Ingersolls, and Drexels have contributed far fewer leaders to their state and nation. From the days of Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard down to the present, what leadership there has been in Philadelphia has largely been provided by self-made men, often, like Franklin, born outside Pennsylvania. Baltzell traces the differences in class authority and leadership in these two cites to the contrasting values of the Puritan founders of the Bay Colony and the Quaker founders of the City of Brotherly Love. While Puritans placed great value on the "calling" or devotion to one's chosen vocation, Quakers have always placed more emphasis on being a good person than on being a good judge or statesman. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia presents a provocative view of two contrasting upper classes and also reflects the author's larger concern with the conflicting values of hierarchy and egalitarianism in American history.

Tennis is a high-stakes game, played by prodigies identified early and coached by professionals in hopes of high rankings and endorsements. This commercial world is far removed from the origins of the sport. Before 1968 when Wimbledon invited professional players to compete for the first time tennis was part of a sportsmanship tradition that emphasized character over money. It produced well-rounded gentlemen who expressed a code of honor, not commerce. In this authoritative and affectionate history of men's tennis, distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell recovers the glory of the age. From its aristocratic origins in the late ninteenth century, to the Tilden years, and through a succession of newcomers, the amateur era and its virtues survived a century of democratization and conflict. Sporting Gentlemen examines the greatest players and matches in the history of tennis. Baltzell explores the tennis code of honor and its roots in the cricket code of the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American upper class. This code of honor remained in spite of the later democratization of tennis. Thus, the court manners of the Renshaw twins and Doherty brothers at the Old Wimbledon were upheld to the letter by Don Budge and Jack Kramer as well as Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Arthur Ashe. Baltzell's final chapter on the Open Era is a blistering attack on the decline of honor and the obliteration of class distinctions, leaving only those based on money. For all who love the game of tennis, Sporting Gentlemen is both fascinating history and a badly needed analysis of what has made the sport great.

Tennis is a high-stakes game, played by prodigies identified early and coached by professionals in hopes of high rankings and endorsements. This commercial world is far removed from the origins of the sport. Before 1968-when Wimbledon invited professional players to compete for the first time-tennis was part of a sportsmanship tradition that emphasized character over money. It produced well-rounded gentlemen who expressed a code of honor, not commerce. In this authoritative and affectionate history of men's tennis, distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell recovers the glory of the age. From its aristocratic origins in the late ninteenth century, to the Tilden years, and through a succession of newcomers, the amateur era and its virtues survived a century of democratization and conflict. Sporting Gentlemen examines the greatest players and matches in the history of tennis. Baltzell explores the tennis code of honor and its roots in the cricket code of the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American upper class. This code of honor remained in spite of the later democratization of tennis. Thus, the court manners of the Renshaw twins and Doherty brothers at the Old Wimbledon were upheld to the letter by Don Budge and Jack Kramer as well as Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Arthur Ashe. Baltzell's final chapter on the Open Era is a blistering attack on the decline of honor and the obliteration of class distinctions, leaving only those based on money. For all who love the game of tennis, Sporting Gentlemen is both fascinating history and a badly needed analysis of what has made the sport great.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, 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. This loss of power and authority has been the focus of the work of E. Digby Baltzell, whose 1964 work, "The Protestant Establishment, "analyzed the fate and function of a predominantly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant upper class in an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous democracy. After 27 years, Baltzell's theory of the structure and function of the establishment remains unique in the literature of class stratification and authority.

Baltzell views an open and authoritative establishment as a necessary and desirable part of the process of securing responsible leaders in a democratic society. Such an establishment is the product of upper-class institutions that are open to talented individuals of varying ethnic and social backgrounds. The values of upper-class tradition include an aristocratic ethos emphasizing the duty to lead, as opposed to the snobbish ethos of caste that emphasizes only the right to privilege. Baltzell regards this as a protector of freedom in modern democratic societies, guaranteeing rules of fair play in contests of power and opinion.

As Baltzell points out, historically, the alternatives to rule by establishments have been, rule by functionaries and demogogues, neither of which has proven satisfactory in protecting freedoms. As against Marxists, who see hegemony as a social evil, Baltzell, following Tocqueville, sees it as necessary to the well-being of society. Hegemonic establishments give coherence to the social spheres of greatest contest. They do not eliminate conflict, but prevent it from ripping society apart.

Baltzell's work provides uncommon insight into the relationship of social class and personal power in contemporary America. This book will be of interest to sociologists, political scientists, historians of urban life, and American studies specialists.

Judgment and Sensibility is the second volume of the collected essays of E. Digby Baltzell, one of the keenest observers and analysts of America's upper classes since Thorstein Veblen. Spanning four decades of writing, these essays cover a wide range of topics, including contemporary politics, democratic elitism, Puritanism, Judaism, higher education, urbanization, and the U.S. Supreme Court, among others.

Based on the biographies of some three hundred people in each city, this book shows how such distinguished Boston families as the Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Peabodys have produced many generations of men and women who have made major contributions to the intellectual, educational, and political life of their state and nation. At the same time, comparable Philadelphia families such as the Biddles, Cadwaladers, Ingersolls, and Drexels have contributed far fewer leaders to their state and nation. From the days of Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard down to the present, what leadership there has been in Philadelphia has largely been provided by self-made men, often, like Franklin, born outside Pennsylvania.

Baltzell traces the differences in class authority and leadership in these two cites to the contrasting values of the Puritan founders of the Bay Colony and the Quaker founders of the City of Brotherly Love. While Puritans placed great value on the "calling" or devotion to one's chosen vocation, Quakers have always placed more emphasis on being a good person than on being a good judge or statesman. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia presents a provocative view of two contrasting upper classes and also reflects the author's larger concern with the conflicting values of hierarchy and egalitarianism in American history.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This story of the Houston and Woodward families' continuing public service offers a unique perspective on Philadelphia history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "Contosta evinces in this book a genuine and unforced affection for his subjects, which comes through in the pages of this well-illustrated and informative volume."--"Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography" Three generations of the Houston-Woodward family, one of the wealthiest and most influential in Philadelphia, have been leaders in politics, diplomacy, suburban planning, housing reform, land conservation, and historic preservation. In "A Philadelphia Family," David Contosta analyzes the impact the Houstons and Woodwards have had economically, politically, and demographically on Philadelphia, a city known for its reserved and private leading families. The story of the Houston and Woodward families' continuing public service offers a unique perspective on Philadelphia history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Family founder Henry Howard Houston (1820-1895) was one of America's greatest post-Civil War entrepreneurs, a top executive of the Pennsylvania Railroad as well as a leading speculator in oil, mining, and other railroad ventures. Houston created a unique, planned suburb in Chestnut Hill, which his son Samuel and son-in-law George Woodward maintained and expanded in the twentieth century. Woodward, in particular, became an energetic crusader for housing reform. Other family members have distinguished themselves in government service and charitable work. Stanley Woodward served in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, George Woodward was a state senator for 30 years, and Lawrence M. C. Smith was founder and owner of a prominent classical music station in Philadelphia. David R. Contosta is Professor and Chair in the Department of History at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. He is the author of "America in the Twentieth Century" and "Henry Adams and the American Experiment."

It is my earnest desire to pursue this particular form of study far enough to constitute a fair basis of induction as to the present condition of the American Negro. If, for instance, Boston in the East, Chicago and perhaps Kansas City in the West, and Atlanta, New Orleans and Galveston in the Souths were studied in a similar way, we should have a trustworthy picture of Negro city life. Add to this an inquiry into similarly selected country districts, and certainly our knowledge of the Negro would be greatly increased. The department of history and economics of Atlanta University, where I am now situated, is pursuing certain lines of inquiry in this general direction. I hope that funds may be put at our disposal for this larger and more complete scheme. Finally, let me add that I trust that this study with all its errors and shortcomings will at least serve to emphasize the fact that the Negro problems are problems of human beings; ungrounded assumptions or metaphysical subtleties. They present a field which the student must enter seriously, and cultivate carefully and honestly. And until he has prepared the ground by intelligent and discriminating research, the labors of philanthropist and statesman must continue to be, to a large extent, barren and unfruitful. ---- WE.B. DuBois 1899].

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.

Judgment and Sensibility is the second volume of the collected essays of E. Digby Baltzell, one of the keenest observers and analysts of America's upper classes since Thorstein Veblen. Spanning four decades of writing, these essays cover a wide range of topics, including contemporary politics, democratic elitism, Puritanism, Judaism, higher education, urbanization, and the U.S. Supreme Court, among others.

This classic account of the traditional upper class in America traces its origins, lifestyles, and political and social attitudes from the time of Theodore Roosevelt to that of John F. Kennedy. Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell describes the problems of exclusion and prejudice within the community of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (or WASPs, an acronym he coined) and predicts with amazing accuracy what will happen when this inbred group is forced to share privilege and power with talented members of minority groups. "The book may actually hold more interest today than when it was first published. New generations of readers can resonate all the more to this masterly and beautifully written work that provides sociological understanding of its engrossing subject."-Robert K. Merton, Columbia University "The documentation and illustration in the book make it valuable as social history, quite apart from any theoretical hypothesis. As such, it sketches the rise of the WASP penchant for country clubs, patriotic societies and genealogy. It traces the history of anti-Semitism in America. It describes the intellectual conflict between Social Darwinism and the environmental social science founded half a century ago by men like John Dewey, Charles A. Beard, Thorstein Veblen, Franz Boas and Frederick Jackson Turner. In short, The Protestant Establishment is a wide-ranging, intelligent and provocative book."-Alvin Toffler, New York Times Book Review "The Protestant Establishment has many virtues that lift it above the level we have come to expect in works of contemporary social and cultural analysis. It is clearly and convincingly written."-H. Stuart Hughes, New York Review of Books "What makes Baltzell's analysis of the evolution of the American elite superior to the accounts of earlier writers . . . is that he exposes the connections between high social status and political and economic power."-Dennis H. Wrong, Commentary