| Sumario: | The article offers a framework for investigating class and class differences in the early years of America's nationhood and the elites of the United States. Elites are groups of people who are a distinct minority, who cannot even be a sizeable plurality and who are distinguishable from the rest of the population. The bottom of the materialistic/mechanistic bifocal lens through which one can view class is the most basic: follow the money, and specifically, the degree to which people had access to capital as a critical measure of elites in the early republic. Elites signaled their sense of status through affectations, consumption patterns, and social attitudes.
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