ABSTRACT
All social systems are grounded in the division of labor and the production and distribution of wealth. This chapter discusses how and when did the family founders acquire their wealth, how successful have their heirs been in keeping their inheritances, and how does an upper class, assimilate new men of wealth and their families into an upper-class style of life. It also discusses how do upper-class values serve to motivate men of privilege to contribute to the enrichment of the cultural and political life of the society as a whole? The Philadelphia group of money-makers was larger and far less coherent: the forty Philadelphians came from twenty-five families, or exactly half of the Philadelphia First Families sample. Leadership in the Philadelphia textile industry, then, came largely from new men, often auslanders and cut-flowers, who were not First Family progenitors. Leadership in the Philadelphia textile industry was indeed atomized as compared to its Boston counterpart.
