The Protestant Establishment Revisited

E. Digby Baltzell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351475952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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 inte

1

Elite and Upper-Class Indexes in Metropolitan America

In the 1930s and 1940s, the sociological literature in America was enriched by a wealth of monographs in which social stratification was the central theme.¹ With staffs trained in interviewing techniques, the filling out of schedules, and the operation of “IBM” machines, sociologists made numerous painstaking, investigations of stratification in the small community. Such terms as “upper-upper,” “lower-upper,” and “lower-lower” were added to the language of social thought, and, even in America, aristocracy was found cohabiting with democracy.

Of the multitude of monographs describing the small community in America, the contrasting conceptual approaches of the Lynds on the one hand, and W. Lloyd Warner and his disciples on the other, represent the two divergent emphases in class analysis.² The Lynds, who begin both their Middletown volumes with a chapter on “Getting a Living,” emphasize the dynamics of the economic class system and the differential distribution of power in a changing society. On the other hand, Warner, an anthropologist who had recently returned from a study of preliterate cultures in Australia when he began the “Yankee City” study, categorically rejects an economic interpretation of stratification and emphasizes the differences in ritual and style of life as between subcultural class levels in a comparatively static and traditional New England community.³ Whereas Warner defines a class system in subjective terms as “two or more orders of people who are believed to be, and are accordingly ranked by members of the community, in socially superior and inferior positions,” the Lynds employ an objective definition which differentiates between the “business” and “working” classes.⁴ While the members of the “upper-upper” class in Yankee City, a majority of whom are women, are emulated and exercise a measure of social control because of their “lineage,” their “good-breeding,” and the fact that they “know how to act,” in Middletown, in the 1930s, the “passage of first generation wealth into second generation power” had created a newly self-conscious upper class whose male members tended to dominate the business and financial life of the city.⁵

At the present stage in the development of American sociology, the conceptual approach of the “Warner School” represents the dominant trend in stratification analysis. As perhaps the current emphasis on the subjective aspects of class is an over-reaction on the part of American social scientists to the admittedly incomplete Marxian emphasis on the objective economic indexes of class position, a more balanced approach may be achieved by utilizing both the subjective and the objective class concepts as differentially related variables in various social situations.⁶ It is not a question of whether the objective class concept is more, or less, “real” than the subjective class concept; rather, both concepts are abstractions from concrete reality, and the failure to treat them as such may lead to reification or a sterile circular reasoning. In other words, the behavior patterns, values, and attitudes of groups of people differentially situated in any class system are presumably conditioned both by their position in the productive process (occupational rank or income) and by their subjective class position (social access, family position, and so forth). Generals who are aristocrats may be expected to behave differently than generals who are not aristocrats.

Separating out the subjective and the objective aspects of class position for purposes of analysis, in this paper, the elite concept refers to those individuals who are the most successful and stand at the top of the functional (objective) class hierarchy. These individuals are leaders in their chosen occupations or professions; they are the final-decision-makers in the political, economic, or military spheres as well as leaders in such professions as law, engineering, medicine, education, religion, and the arts. On the other hand, in any comparatively stable social structure, over the years, certain elite members and their families will tend to associate with one another in various primary group situations and gradually develop a consciousness of kind and a distinctive style of life. The upper-class concept, then, refers to a group of families, descendants of successful individuals (elite members) one, two, three, or more generations ago, who are at the top of the social (subjective) class hierarchy. As Dixon Wecter puts it:

A group of families with a common background and racial origin becomes cohesive, and fortifies itself by the joint sharing of sports and social activities, by friendships and intermarriage. Rough and piratical grandfathers had seized their real estate, laid out their railroads, and provided for its trust funds. The second and third generation, relieved from the counting-house and shop, now begin to travel, buy books and pictures, learn about horses and wine and cultivate the art of charm.⁷

While the numerous sociological studies of small American communities have unquestionably contributed valuable knowledge about the ways of human behavior and the nature of social organization, it is perhaps fair to say that the large metropolitan area is more representative of American life in the middle twentieth century. In order to gain some insight into the nature of stratification in metropolitan America, Who’s Who in America, a listing of individuals of high functional class position (achieved status), and the Social Register, a listing of families of high social class position (ascribed status), may be useful indexes of a metropolitan elite and upper class, respectively.⁸ The limited task of this paper is to show how, in the last part of the nineteenth century, the Social Register became a metropolitan upper-class index, and how, in certain large cities in 1940, this upper class was related to the elite, those listed in Who’s Who in America.

The Social Register

For those who see history as a record of man’s creative efforts to choose between alternatives in an endless chain of historical situations and not only as a series of reactions to various abstract causes, geographic, climatic, racial, or economic, which more or less determine his destiny, human society is an historical process wherein each generation sifts to the top particular individual types, warriors, prophets, priests, merchants, bankers, or bureaucrats, whose talents are needed in any given period; these individuals, in turn, and within limits, make the decisions which shape the course of history. Thus Brooks Adams saw the history of England as partly reflected in the circulation of elites, wherein the feudal warrior, whose power lay in men and spears, was replaced during the Reformation by the large landowners who ruled England from the time of Henry VIII to 1688, when the rising merchant adventurer or bourgeois elites finally won their rights, only to be followed by the manufacturing men such as Watt and Boulton whose talents led them to power after the Industrial Revolution; and finally, from the time of the defeat of that symbol of martial power on the hill at Waterloo, the manufacturing and landowning elites were dominated by, and often in debt to, the money power of Lombard Street.⁹ The English upper class, often called an aristocracy, centers in a group of families who are descendants of these successful individuals of the remote and recent past and of course alloyed with, and having an influence on, those with a talent for power in the modern bureaucratic period.

As in England, America has witnessed a procession of successful men who have risen to positions of wealth and power, and whose children and grandchildren have been brought up and lived in more or less socially isolated subcultural worlds. As the Beards say:

On the eve of the Civil War there had been many “seasoned clans” on the Eastern seaboard, some of them dating their origins back a hundred years or more, and boasting of ancestors who had served as preachers, judges, warriors, and statesmen in colonial times, in the heroic epoch of the Revolution, and in the momentous age of the new Republic. Able to hold their own socially, if not politically, these select families had absorbed with facility the seepage of rising fortunes that gradually oozed into their ranks until the flood of the new plutocracy descended upon them.¹⁰

All families are equally old; “old families” are those whose ancestors rose to positions of affluence in an earlier period than the so-called new families.¹¹ As late as the 1870s or 1880s in America, “Society” in the older eastern seaboard cities was a rather well-defined, primary group of families who knew one another well and knew “who” belonged in “polite society.” Even in the middle of the twentieth century in these cities, the “old families,” the “Proper” Bostonians, Philadelphians, or New Yorkers, are those whose fortunes were made in the pre-Civil War period; late nineteenth century wealth is still considered new. As Cleveland Amory says of Boston:

All through Boston history, when a family loses its financial stability, it has a way of beginning to disappear. After the Revolution, or better still, after the War of 1812 and lasting roughly through the Civil War, in the great Family-founding days of the nineteenth century, somewhere along the line there must be a merchant prince, the real Family-founder.¹²

As with so much else in American life, the 1880s mark a turning point in upper-class history; the local familistic-communal upper classes were absorbed in a new upper class which was increasingly extra-communal and associationally defined.¹³ After the “Second American Revolution,” in which the industrial North brought the planter aristocracy to its knees, new fortunes of undreamed-of proportions were created;¹⁴ as transportation and communication improved, from all parts of the great American continent, barons (of dry goods, utilities, coal, oil, and railroads) moved their families to New York, built ostentatious Victorian piles, entertained, and, where possible, moved into “Society.” By the 1880s, New York was the center of social life in the United States.¹⁵

There was the usual resistance at first, but “by one process or another amalgamation was affected and new varnish softened by the must of age. As the landed gentlemen of England had on various occasions saved their houses from decay by discreet jointures with mercantile families, so many of the established families in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore escaped the humiliation of poverty by judicious selections from the onrushing plutocracy.”¹⁶ Amidst this incredible “Gilded Age,” in the year 1887, the Social Register was copyrighted by the Social Register Association and the first volume appeared for New York City in 1888. There were less than two thousand families listed in this “record of society, comprising an accurate and careful list of its members, with their addresses, many of the maiden names of the married women, the club addresses of the men, officers of the leading clubs and social organizations, opera box holders, and other useful social information.”¹⁷ As Dixon Wecter put it in his Saga of American Society:

Here at last, unencumbered with advertisements of dress-makers and wine merchants, enhanced by large, clear type and a pleasant binding of orange and black—which if anything, suggested the colors of America’s most elegant university—was a convenient listing of one’s friends and potential friends. It was an immediate triumph.¹⁸

The New York Social Register was soon followed by volumes for Boston and Philadelphia in 1890, Baltimore in 1892, Chicago in 1893, Washington, D.C., in 1900, St. Louis and Buffalo in 1903, Pittsburgh in 1904, San Francisco in 1906, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copy Right Page
• Content Page
• Introduction
• 1 Elite and Upper-Class Indexes in Metropolitan America
• 2 Upper Class and Elites
• 3 The WASP’s Last Gasp
• 4 The American Aristocrat and Other-Direction
• 5 The Protestant Establishment Revisited
• 6 Upper-Class Clubs and Associations in Philadelphia
• 7 Social Mobility and Fertility Within an Elite Group
• 8 Thorstein Veblen: Scientism and the Modern Mood
• 9 W.E.B. Du Bois and The Philadelphia Negro
• 10 Reflections on Aristocracy
• 11 The Search for Community in Modern America
• 12 To Be a Phoenix: Reflections on Two Noisy Ages of Prose
• 13 Cultural Pluralism in Modern America and William Penn’s Colony of Pennsylvania
• 14 Social Class in the Oval Office
• Index