Upper Class in Cities and Suburbs

Since colonial times, American society has featured an upper class set aside from other inhabitants by wealth and power. The northern branch of this elite was [Page 821]largely urban, whereas the southern resided on rural plantations. After the northern triumph ended the Civil War and destroyed the fortunes of the southern elite, most remaining members of the American upper class lived in the metropolitan regions of the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, where they have continued to live to the present. Unlike the upper classes of Europe, the American urban elite have always derived their social status from wealth gained through trade and the ownership of industry rather than from political or military prowess or the ownership of land.

By the middle of the 18th century, the fledgling cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia housed aristocratic families headed by merchants, shipowners, and sea captains. Most enjoyed familiarity with the royal governor (or, in the case of Pennsylvania, the proprietor's agent), which enabled them to amass considerable political power. Wealthy families set standards for gracious living to which their less-successful neighbors could only aspire. They imported luxury goods from England, such as furniture, silver, clothing, and carriages, and supported local artisans, such as Boston's Paul Revere. Their mansions, often built in the latest English style, set the norm for fine domestic architecture. Their children frequently intermarried, and their social functions, as well as their business transactions, tended to be confined within a narrow circle of people like themselves.

Charleston, South Carolina, the other notable early American city, also was home to a local upper class, but unlike their northern counterparts, most of the Charlestonian elite were slave-owning planters, not merchants. They occupied their Charleston town houses only during the winter social season, spending the rest of the year on their plantations.

With their mercantile orientation, the urban elites instinctively resisted the taxation policies of George III's ministers in the 1760s and 1770s, although the outbreak of war in 1775 left them divided. Some members of upper-class urban families, such as the Hutchinson family of Boston, the Philadelphia Penns, and the New York De Lanceys, saw some or most of their clan stand with the king and emigrate to England. Others, such as Boston's John Hancock and James Bowdoin, New York's Philip Livingston, and Philadelphia's Francis Hopkinson, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Wharton, became leaders of the Revolution.

The enormous expansion of the American economy in the 19th century fueled rapid urban growth, and by 1900 the nation counted 19 cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants. Three cities—New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—each housed more than a million people. Nearly every large city featured its own elite merchants, industrialists, bankers, real estate tycoons, and traction magnates, but the elites of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston formed the most highly developed social class. In addition to its indigenous elite, New York City, the nation's financial center, attracted the nation's most successful entrepreneurs. Some, like Cornelius Vanderbilt of Staten Island and Junius Morgan of Hartford, came from nearby, but others, like John D. Rockefeller of Cleveland and Andrew Carnegie of Pittsburgh, moved to New York after making their fortunes elsewhere.

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