Brevity, simplicity, and the avoidance of euphemism are the chief hallmarks of the upper-class American vocabulary. When an upper-class American feels sick, he says just that, and never “I feel ill” or “I feel nauseous.” Cuteness is anathema. Thus in an upper-class American house you would never find a den or a rumpus room or a family room, though you might find a library or a playroom. Upper-class Americans do not own bedroom suites or dining room suites or any other kind of suites, or “suits.” They own furniture, and if it is particularly good furniture, it is often simply called wood. Pretentiousness is similarly shunned. Thus to an upper-class American a tomato is a tomayto, not a tomahto. Upper-class Americans write “R.S.V.P.” on the corners of their invitations, never “The favor of a reply is requested.” Upper-class Americans give and go to parties, never to affairs, and if the affair being talked about is of the romantic variety, it is always, specifically, a love affair.

But, most important, the American upper class never talks about the upper class, or about any other sort of class, for that matter. Partly this is a question of delicacy and taste. It is simply not upper class to talk about class. Also, in a constitutionally classless society where an upper class has managed to emerge anyway, there is a feeling among members of the upper class that they are a somewhat illicit entity, a possibly endangered species. If one were to go about boasting of being upper class, who knows what sort of angry mob from below might rise up and challenge the precious barricades? So you will never hear a member of the upper class talk of “the right people,” or “nice people,” or even “the people we know.” Instead it will be “our friends,” or, more often, “our family and friends.” This way, the polite illusion is created that the American aristocracy is a private, even secret, club, whose members all know each other and whose rules are observed without ever having to be written down or otherwise made public. Most frequently, when the American aristocracy speaks of itself in a general sense, it is in terms of “people,” as in, “What will people say?” And if a member of the upper class behaves—as can happen—in a non-upper-class way, the reaction is “People just don’t do that!”

In an upwardly mobile society, in which nearly everybody dreams of elevating himself to a higher social or economic stratum, there are some rules of upper-class behavior that are easy to learn. For example, when upper-class women swim, they do the Australian crawl, never the breaststroke or backstroke. It is easy to remember that the finger bowl has no function whatsoever—certainly not to dabble one’s fingers in—and is to be removed, with the doily, and set at the upper left of one’s plate, after which the dessert spoon and fork are to be removed from the service plate and placed on either side of it. It is easy to remember that it is acceptable to eat asparagus with one’s fingers (if no tongs have been provided), while it is not acceptable to pick up the chop or the chicken leg in the same manner, unless one is dining en famille. It is never proper to squeeze the juice from a grapefruit half into a spoon.

But there are other more subtle, arcane codes by which members of the American aristocracy recognize each other and send signals to each other and that are more difficult to learn—which, it might be added, is the whole unwritten point of there being such codes. In addition to language and vocabulary, recognition is by name and by the association of name with place. Thus one should be able to remember that Ingersolls and Cadwaladers and Chews and some Morrises are from Philadelphia, while other Morrises are from New York and New Jersey, and so when meeting a Morris it is important to find out which family he or she represents. Livingstons, Jays, Bownes, Lawrences, Schieffelins, Iselins, Schuylers, and Fishes are from New York, while Otises, Saltonstalls, and Gardners are from Boston. Gardiners are from New York. Hoppins and Browns are from Providence, Pringles and Pinckneys are from Charleston, Des Loges are from St. Louis, Stumpfs are pre-oil Texas, and Chandlers are Los Angeles.

Over the past generation, America’s upper-class boarding schools and colleges have become thoroughly democratized, but members of the upper class can still send signals to one another by the way they designate their schools. An upper-class Yale alumnus, for example, would never say that he had graduated “from Yale.” He would say that he had studied “at New Haven.” Following is a list of other upper-class schools and colleges, with their special upper-class designations:

In perfecting an American upper-class accent, one rule to remember is the upper-class injunction to keep a stiff upper lip. The upper lip moves very little in American upper-class speech. But of course members of the American upper class do not have to be taught how to speak this way. They learn it from the cradle.

A comparison of the aristocracies of America and Great Britain is useful, for the American uppermost class has always looked to the British class system as its most satisfactory model. Even at the time of the American Revolution this was true, and many of the American “heroes” whose signatures grace the Declaration of Independence signed this document with great misgivings, distrusting the Revolutionary movement and not at all agreeing with Thomas Jefferson’s notion that “all men are created equal.” A number of American families have aristocratic forebears who managed to be conveniently “out of town” or otherwise unavailable when that document was being signed, and as we shall see, there are American families today who are just as proud of ancestors who failed, or refused, to sign as are those with ancestors who were Signers. Particularly in New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, enthusiasm for the Revolution was lukewarm at best, while in Boston, the Revolutionary cradle, it was intense. Even today, these philosophical differences between Boston and the rest of the East Coast more than two hundred years ago are expressed in a certain antipathy between the upper classes of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore and the upper class of the Bay Colony.

Like the British, many members of the American aristocracy are exceedingly rich while, like some British, some are not, though all manage to live in considerable style. How this is accomplished is sometimes unclear. But it has a lot to do with a creed that one ought to live only “on the income from one’s income,” that one should sell property only under the most desperate circumstances, and the belief that, every generation or so, there is nothing wrong with obtaining a fresh infusion of money through a well-orchestrated marriage.

At the same time, like the members of the Royal House of Windsor since Victoria’s time, American aristocrats in their private lives often convey the impression of being rather ordinary people, neither particularly intellectual nor witty, committed to their friends and to lives that are comfortable and familiar, people who are not remarkable for being anything other than what they are and were born to be—and who are remarkable only for not having to demonstrate, or prove, who they are.

Like the queen of England, women of the American aristocracy rarely change their hairstyles. Nor do they show much real interest in fashion. When they go out-of-doors—which they like to do—they bundle up and will choose a down-filled coat over a mink if the former is warmer. The American aristocracy, like the British, is generally sports-minded. From England, the American aristocracy brought golf and tennis to this country. From Edward VIII’s example, the American upper crust took up skiing. Now these sports have become too popular to still be classified as upper class, though the upper class still enjoys them. The great American sports—baseball, football, hockey, basketball—have never been popular with the upper class, though baseball, the most gentlemanly of these sports, has always found a few adherents. Such English sports as rugby and soccer—and even cricket and beagling—have long been enjoyed by pockets of the American upper class.

Like the English queen and her family, the American aristocracy has a passion for certain quadrupeds: dogs and horses. Since ancient times, the horse has been a mythic symbol of leadership. For centuries, kings and generals and emperors and caesars have had their portraits painted, and their images carved in bronze and marble, astride a horse. This of course is not to say that all members of the American aristocracy are superb equestrians, but it would be safe to assume that nearly all, at some point in their lives, have been taught to sit a horse properly in an English saddle. Fox hunting, the steeplechase, the point-to-point, polo—all popular with England’s landed gentry, where they began centuries ago—remain popular with the American equivalent, who still buy their boots and riding attire in London.

And, just as the queen of England looks happiest surrounded by a pack of yelping corgis, so do the American aristocrats love their dogs. They love dogs, furthermore, in numbers. In an informal survey in New York not long ago, at a gathering where a number of America’s oldest families were assembled, the guests were asked what they were giving their spouses for Christmas. A surprising number said that the gift was going to be a new dog for the family collection—if not for a husband or wife, then for the children or for some other close family member. From this, the conversation turned to books about dogs. Everyone’s favorite dog author, it so happened, was Albert Payson Terhune.

This affection for certain domestic animals does not, however, extend to all forms of wildlife. Hunting, as it is in England, is a pastime enjoyed by the American aristocracy. But aristocrats of neither the English nor American variety would consider hunting squirrels, possum, or rabbits, or even killing the fox in the hunt. Birds, on the other hand, are a different matter—game birds: quail, pheasant, partridge, and grouse. Deer are hunted only when there is a specific ecological reason to do so. Mr. Robert David Lion Gardiner, for example, sixteenth lord of the manor of Gardiner’s Island, which he owns, periodically takes small groups of friends on deer-hunting forays to his island in order to keep the deer population—which would starve if the island became defoliated by its numbers—under control. “It isn’t a pleasant chore,” he says, “but it simply must be done.”

Like the British, the members of the American upper class are not really prejudiced against Jews and Catholics. For one thing, it is not upper class to express religious prejudice, though most members of the upper class would confess that they do not really “understand” Judaism or Catholicism. These religions are, after all, more demanding of their adherents and require the mastery of arcane languages, Hebrew and Latin. Over the years, a number of American upper-class families have intermarried with Jews and Catholics, but it was usually with the understanding that the outsider would convert to the prevailing Protestant mode—just to keep things simpler for future generations. In fact, most American upper-class families are proud of their long record of religious tolerance and of the fact that their aristocratic ancestors saw to it that an article guaranteeing religious freedom was written into the Constitution. When the Dutch colony of Nieuw Amsterdam became the British colony of New York, the old Dutch families did not suddenly become social pariahs. Of course, this is an additional reason why other upper-class Americans look on upper-class Bostonians as a somewhat special, peculiar breed. Puritan New Englanders hated—and tortured and hanged—people who rejected the tenets of their tiny sect.

In the early days of the Republic, the American aristocracy simply assumed that its members would run the new country—as presidents, governors, senators, cabinet members, ambassadors—just as the British aristocracy ran England. It was not until America’s seventh president, the log cabin–born Andrew Jackson, that a man entered the White House who was neither a member of the old Virginia landed gentry nor an Adams from Boston. The aristocratic John Quincy Adams went so far as to call Jackson a “barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” (When Adams’s alma mater, Harvard College, announced its intention years later of conferring on Jackson an honorary Doctorate of Laws degree, Adams was outraged by this breach of the class system and did everything in his power, unsuccessfully, to prevent it.)

In the years since Jackson, Americans continued to elect occasional members of the aristocracy to the presidency—up to and including Franklin D. Roosevelt—but the aristocracy itself had already become sorely disillusioned about the notion of American rulership and about running for high political office. For one thing, they had noted with dismay how fickle the American public could be about its political leaders. When things were going well, the country’s officials were given all the credit. When things went poorly, the politicians were vilified and given all the blame. John Jay, hailed as a national patriot at the time of the Revolution, would have the sorry experience of learning that he had been burned in effigy by an angry mob a few years later. For another, political leadership—in the early days, at least—could be a financially ruinous experience. George Washington complained that the presidency was costing him so much money that he was in danger of going broke, and he very nearly did. He entered the White House as a very rich man and left it with hardly enough to patch up Mount Vernon, which had crumbled during his eight-year absence. Alexander Hamilton, a rich banker and the first secretary of the treasury, died leaving nothing but debts. So did Thomas Jefferson. It began to seem as though the only way politics could be made to pay in America was through corruption, and of course no aristocrat would stoop to that. Gradually, it became merely prudent for the American aristocracy to turn to other less visible—and vulnerable—forms of public service. Today, the American upper class shuns politics, and whether that is the country’s gain or loss can only be a subject for speculation.

Like its British counterpart, the American aristocracy has always tried, at least, to honor the stern concepts of duty and morality. To these might be added a third: patriotism of the kind that has always inspired British gentlemen to lay down their lives for “King [or Queen] and Country.” Patriotism, of course, involves heroism, and heroism involves bravery, and most members of the American aristocracy are proudly able to recite the names of ancestors or other relatives who fought or fell in war. In their houses are often displayed, in glass cases, the fading uniforms of such ancestors, along with appropriate medals, decorations, orders, and citations. As has been said of the British aristocracy, “They die well.” “How he conducts himself in war is perhaps the truest test of a gentleman,” says Mr. Goodhue Livingston of New York, who, as a second lieutenant in the field artillery in World War I, fought at Château-Thierry and was wounded at Soissons. Mr. Livingston is proud not only of that but also of his son-in-law, Moorhead Kennedy, who was taken hostage during one of the recent Iranian crises—a crisis being a way a gentleman can show his mettle.

But it would be wrong to dismiss the members of the American aristocracy as mere ancestor worshippers, though the time orientation of the upper class—in Britain and America—has always been toward the past, and knowing “where we come from.” The majority of Americans focus on the future,...