Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia

...Indeed, the best known Philadelphians tended not to come from the city's upper class...

...Viewed in terms of their actual historical context, however, the Brahmins are part of a more complex process in which the continuum of power and achievement was based on inclusion and cooptation...

...While this enterprise may give some satisfaction to those living in the present by providing them with the illusion that they owe their present positions to historical inevitability, it sheds no light on how or why one group succeeded while others failed, it tells us nothing about the actual influence of ideology on social groups or the importance of non-ideological factors in affecting the fortunes of such groups...

...Boston and its institutions make indisputably greater contributions to American arts, letters, politics, and business than does Philadelphia...

...As a result they remained a group of individually wealthy and powerful but collectively ineffectual families in a city, state, and nation to which they made diminishing contributions and over which they exercised little control...

...The work of E. Digby Baltzell since the 1950s has been among the few attempts to deal dispassionately and judiciously with the problem of class power in the United States...

...For it is one thing to assert linkages of ideology to social and historical phenomena...

...The anxiety is apparent in the methodological extremism of the literature: it is either obsessively particularized, a sort of anecdotalized sociological pornography in the, style of Stephen Birmingham and Cleveland Amory, or paranoically overdocumented, in the mode of Ferdinand Lundberg and G. William Domhoff...

...Central to his argument about the differences between the two cities is his notion that prominent Bostonians tended to represent a continuum of achievement...

...The basic method of the book consists of a survey of the relative contributions to American life by natives and residents of the two cities as assessed by the Dictionary of American Biography...

...Only this latter alliance permitted his son, Doctor Holmes, and his grandson, the Justice, to consider themselves to be descended from the founders of the Province...

...This is so rarely done, at least successfully, that one need not live a very long life to see most of the rich families he knew in his childhood more or less reduced, and the millions shifted into the hands of the country-boys who were sweeping stores, and carrying parcels when the now decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eat-ing their venison over silver chafing dishes, drinking Madeira chilled in embossed coolers, wearing their hair in powder, and casing their legs in long boots with silken tassels...

...But to claim that elite powerholders represent a class requires evidence, not a circular impressionism in which an elite is defined as a class because of its participation in certain institutions and institutions are defined as class institutions because they produced an elite...

...Penn, in sum, was not Harvard — and the differences lay deep within the cities' ideologies and social structures...

...For as Holmes's father well knew, while it was, "all things being equal," preferable to be "a man of family," possessed of such things as "four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen," family portraits by Smibert, Copley, and Stuart, books with the names of educated forebears inscribed on their fly-leaves, and so on, these things could be acquired through judicious marriages...

...But nowhere in Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia does one find any real history...

...It is the common failing of virtually all scholarly attempts to deal with class power in America...

...Of course this trivial and fugitive fact of personal wealth does not create a permanent class, unless some special means are taken to arrest the process of disintegration in the third generation...

...Viewed restrospectively, as Baltzell does, the Holmeses and other Brahmin families appear to be 23 May 1980: 309 members of a continuum of first families...

...Baltzell, like Weber before him, has constructed convincing ideal types of the social attitudes of seventeenth century Puritans and Quakers and linked them with great facility to the apparent differential contributions by Philadelphians and Bostonians to American life and letters...

...His doing so both distorts the facts and masks the actual machinery of class formation...

...Baltzell's hypothesis is a good one...

...For the last two decades historical particularists have argued against the use of the social sciences by historians, using as their main objection the ahistorical character of such efforts...

...It is all very well to descriptively catalogue the unequal distribution of wealth and power in America — as Baltzell, Mills, Domhoff, Lundberg, and others have done...

...The problem with Baltzell's approach is that it tells us nothing of either the old families which failed to coopt the newly ambitious or the new families which were unable to form alliances with the old...

...In place of a really rigorous analysis capable of accounting for the facts and educing workable abstractions from them, one is given a pseudo-analysis, a set of abstractions which, rather than being derived from historical data, dictated their selection...

...Few scholars of American society and culture would disagree with it...

...But to use it as a measure of the actual contributions of individuals to American life is absurd — for historiography is, after all, largely a method of legitimating the present...

...The progressive fallacy selects out of the past those facts which, viewed post hoc, lead irresistibly to the present...

...Boston's greatest men, Baltzell argues, came overwhelmingly from the city's leading families...

...Accordingly, he is quick to cite the distinguished antecedents of men like Justice Holmes and thereby credit them with first family status...

...It is a far more difficult task to analytically trace out how ideology actually influenced the specific actions of men and institutions...

...Philadelphians, because of their egalitarian individualism, were never able to mobilize their wealth or their energies collectively...

...As Doctor Holmes suggested in the introduction of his novel Elsie Venner (the book in which he coined the term "Brahmin" as applied to upper class New Englanders), a great many families did not survive: . . . the millionocracy, considered in a large way, is not an affair of persons and families, but a perpetual fact of money with a variable human element...

...Books: A TALE OF TWO CITIES PURITAN BOSTON AND QUAKER PHILADELPHIA: TWO PROTESTANT ETHICS AND THE SPIRIT OF CLASS AUTHORITY AND LEADERSHIP E. Digby Baltzell The Free Press, $19.95, 585 pp...

...And yet, in the end, Baltzell falls prey to the same anxieties and political distortions of viewpoint that have bedeviled his fellow scholars...

...The differences between Philadelphia and Boston are fundamentally historical...

...Abiel married in succession Mary Stiles, daughter of Yale's president, and Sarah Wendell, an alliance which not only tied the family to Boston's post-Revolutionary merchant wealth but also, and more importantly, to the ancient and respectable Quincy...

...The Dictionary of American Biography, published between 1927 and 1972, is a good indicator of how Americans in the present view their past and who in their past they deem significant...

...At the end one is left with no operational understanding of how to deal with power other than, for conservatives, deference and resignation, for radicals, revolution...

...The real disappointment of Baltzell's treatise is that he evidently made no effort to acquaint himself with either the enormous body of solid historical evidence that could have made his case a convincing one, nor did he avail himself of the significant and exciting analytical work of the new social historians who, since 1960, have been at the forefront of reinterpreting the American past and transforming history into a major contributor to social theory...

...It is difficult to quarrel with Baltzell's thesis in his latest and largest opus, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, that the differential abilities of Bostonians and Philadelphians to occupy positions of leadership in the national worlds of politics, business, and commerce has stemmed from the divergent religious traditions of the upper classes of the two cities...

...But this linkage, as with Max Weber's in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is merely one of logicalnecessity — any real historical referent is purely coincidental...

...His unfamiliarity with David Hall's work on the early New England clergy, his ignorance of Lawrence Vesey's seminal Emergence of the American University, Bledstein's Culture of Professionalism, Horowitz's Transformation of American Law, or with the numerous articles and dissertations that have appeared over the last twenty years dealing with the topics on which he writes is simply inexcusable...

...Bostonians, because of their hierarchical communalism, early collectivized their wealth and power through philanthropy, institution-building, and public service in politics and the professions, ultimately setting the values and styles of the national establishment...

...Baltzell's failure to examine the actual processes of class formation and the operations of class hegemony is not unique to this book...

...Nowhere are the potential distortions of this approach more disturbingly clear than in Baltzell's treatment of social class...

...The Philadelphia-Quaker tradition, egalitarian and anti-institutional, Commonweal: 308 prevented the formation of nationally influential organizations capable of broadly disseminating class values and power and of coopting upwardly mobile talent...

...Indeed, the Holmeses were a Connecticut frontier family of no great distinction until Abiel, a farmer's son went to Yale and became a minister...

...It is a disservice to his own courageous willingness to intelligently pursue issues that most American scholars preferred to avoid and, more seriously, it positively undercuts the ability of younger scholars to engage in studies of class power...

...Baltzell has, unfortunately, provided them with powerful ammunition...

...It is, moreover, important to show that representatives of certain institutions and cities hold — and historically have held — a disproportionate share of property and influence...

...Commonweal: 310...

...Similary, the Adamses, Lowells, Cabots, and other proverbial Boston first families were of little or no account until they made fortunes in the Revolutionary Era and legitimated their wealth through alliances to those of older and more consequential lineage...

...More importantly, by confusing the existence of policy elites with the question of class and class institutions, he has obscured both the very real need for such elites and the means of creating them in the context of a democratic society...

...The Boston-Puritan tradition, on the other hand, with its communal and hierarchical orientation, consistently produced both leadership institutions and individuals of national consequence...

...Such an approach, whether employed in defense of elites (as is the case with Baltzell) or in condemning or exposing them, is intellectually disingenuous and politically naive...

...Problems arise, however, when Baltzell moves beyond mere description...

...Peter Dobkin Hall NO ASPECT of American society produces more anxiety among its explorers than does the problem of the distribution of wealth and power in this land of the free...

...It views the past from the winner's perspective, as the present writ small...