Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores description of the development of this national, metropolitan upper class. A systematic treatment of social stratification usually has to arrive at some specific number of class levels. It is important to realize, however, that one divides a community into as many class levels as one must for the purposes at hand. The book concerns primarily with an analysis of the growth and development of an American metropolitan upper class. This book discusses the rise of a national upper class in America during the last decades of the nineteenth century, and how the Social Register was founded in response to the need for a formal listing of this new, inter-city plutocracy. The book examines the historical development and contemporary structure of the Philadelphia upper class and its influence in the local elite in 1940.