ABSTRACT
Digby Baltzell wrote of Philadelphia gentlemen, but with the cutting edge of a New York educated plebeian. He compared elites of Boston and Philadelphia, but with the sharp eye to the failings of all elites when it comes to servicing the needs of everyman. He excoriated the commercialism of modern sport, knowing full well that the days of the gentleman athlete had passed. Digby had too much skepticism about unilinear and unilateral theories of history to accept such a formulation. Digby said it best when he wrote in the new introduction to the edition of Philadelphia Gentlemen: Anyone, finally, with a sense of history knows that all ages have their troubles and these give rise to feelings of loss compared with some supposedly more settled era. As Abraham Lincoln once put it, if we are lost in the woods, we begin to find our way by retracing where we have been.
