Membership in the Society of the Cincinatti was/is limited to Continental Army officers, their eldest sons, and so on, through the eldest male line. Many thought they were trying to create a national aristocracy.
But a certain egalitarianism was fairly ingrained in American culture long before the Revolution. You had your gentlemen and your roughsorts, and everyone respected the King, but all in all the Colonies had a level of social mobility, and a mass participation in local government, that was shocking to newcomers from Europe. That's why so many people moved here. There was a reason we went with a system without nobility; it wasn't just a flip of a coin.
There are earlier PODs that could result in a more durable American aristocracy, I think. Maryland was originally an imitation-feudal kind of place. Carolina and other places were property of "lords proprietor". This system could have evolved to the point where the aristocracy had a more definite role in the governments that emerged.
This. You all are seriously misunderstanding what the American Revolution was all about for most of the participants. You're repeating silly rumors and, it seems, making some up. None of them have basis in historical fact. The monarchists were a tiny, nearly insignificant faction and they weren't even actual 'monarchists' in the sense that they wanted a king, they simply wanted to get rid of the states and replace them with a fully national government, still republican in nature. Genuine, "Give me a king or give me death!", people simply couldn't gain any political traction. The American colonies already had a long tradition of wide participatory democracy.
I mean, have any of you read
Common Sense?
This entire topic verges on ASB.
EDIT: You know what? I've got some free time so I'll do each and every one of these.
Like the title says, what if, after the British recognize American independence, in an effort to salvage relations with the monarchies of Europe, the U.S. invents noble titles, and gives them to the heroes of the American Revolution.
This is just not going to happen. The American Revolution was one of the early liberal revolutions, an ideological thing which outright rejected birthright privileges. Titles of nobility go completely against that. The American Founders were inspired by guys like John Locke and Montesquieu, they weren't interested in an aristocracy. And no, the southern plantation owners weren't aristocrats, no matter how often we may call them so colloquially these days. Even if some of them had been hit hard over the head and ended up supporting an aristocracy, there's a large, well-trained, veteran group of small-holders willing to object, having just fought a war against that very sort of thing. The only possibility ever was George Washington becoming a very weak, constitutional monarch, and that was politically impossible.
Yeah you know the constitution only permitted land owners to vote originally I'd say we stay a lot more conservative than we would be.
The Constitution said
nothing about who was allowed to vote, that was left up to the individual states. Some, like Virginia, retained property qualifications for the vote, but it's important to remember that most of the states with property qualifications had vast amounts of essentially free land for any one who was willing to work it to go and take. It's misleading to say the property qualifications made it so the majority couldn't vote, because the majority owned property! Some states, however, immediately adopted universal male suffrage, such as in Pennsylvania or New Jersey.
I don't see why not. The issue was probably considered (or at least proposed) but they definitely did not think much about it.
Well, as mentioned, John Adams was all about making the office of President very aristocratic in nature, giving it an official title something like, "His Excellency and Defender of our Liberties, the President". He was kind of alone on this, though. The closest that others came were such things as several of the early plans for Union involved the creation of a Senate whose members were elected or appointed for life, although this is definitely not the same thing as titled nobility.
I don't know where I heard it but I heard America was originally supposed to be an elective monarchy, with the monarch elected every 10 years or so by land owners. George Washington managed to turn it into a proper republic. Or so I heard, probably from someone who wasnt an American

.
Jim
I don't know where you heard this but it has no basis in the historical record. Some of the plans for Union, again, did include electing the president for life, but those were all rejected early on, usually before they even left committee.
Huh hadn't heard that one, I did hear the military offered to make Washington King, and thus the whole spiel about George III and George I
This one DID happen, in that a a cabal of military officers from the Continental Army were thinking of marching on Philadelphia during the 1787 convention and demanding Washington be crowned, but Washington himself dispelled the conspiracy by refusing to participate. Getting things to go differently requires changing Washington's personality.
This entire thread comes down to ignorance of the conditions surrounding the Revolutionary era. A noble republic simply wasn't going to happen, democracy with wide suffrage was an already established tradition in American culture at the time. Colonial militia
elected the officers that would lead the, for instance.