ABSTRACT
The Protestant Establishment’s power and authority, as well as its social class and status, rather than its ethnicity, were driving forces in American history and contemporary society. Although the Protestant Establishment, about which E. Digby Baltzell has written both admiringly and critically, is almost invisible in American political and cultural life, it provided him with a virtual case study of how class and authority are intimately connected. As Baltzell has shown, “upper class anti-Semitism was perhaps more blatantly displayed in the five decades after 1880 than at any other time in our history.” In a trilogy of classic books—Philadelphia Gentlemen, The Protestant Establishment, and Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia—Baltzell has written what amounts to a fully articulated sociological history of the rise and fall of the American upper class as an authoritative establishment in American history. The vast majority of Americans were white, of Anglo-Saxon origin, and Protestant.
