ABSTRACT
Corinne Gilb observes that "professional organizations came relatively late in the organizational revolution" and suggests that "to articulate and sustain the new and needed levels of professionalism, and to hold their own in a society whose various other members were increasingly organized, formed organizations. Tocqueville's prediction that a narrow and harsher "aristocracy" would be spawned by industry in democratic societies had become true by mid-century in the leading urban centers. The Democrats may have been quicker to seize its political potential, especially since egalitarianism responded to the sentiment of at least one sector, urban and radical, of their constituency. The entry of the United States into a period of extended and remarkably rapid economic growth coincides, roughly, with Jacksonian democracy— that is, the twelve years between 1829 and 1841 in which Andrew Jackson and his chosen successor Martin van Buren seized the presidency "from the remnant of the republican elite." .
