The Founding Fathers disdained aristocracy and hereditary privilege. Forty years after Evacuation Day, New York City politicians still charged their opponents with having “aristocratical notions.” Perhaps they sought to deny the human passion for distinctions – titles, decorations, fancy uniforms, any outward ornament – that raises one above the common crowd.

Consider military medals. Our first decoration, the Medal of Honor, was instituted only during the Civil War. No other federal awards were issued until President Theodore Roosevelt authorized campaign medals for the Civil, Indian, and Spanish American Wars in 1906. Today, as one austere Army officer has observed, “medals [rain] from the heavens.” The Army awarded more gongs for the Grenada invasion than there were troops on the ground.

Even titles have come to pass. Consider the word “Honorable” before a politician’s name (which seems an oxymoron). Once only presidents, senators and congressmen, ambassadors, governors, and mayors enjoyed that style. The list has inflated over time. Bronx politician Stanley Simon took out full-page campaign advertisements in the Riverdale Press suggesting the honorific somehow confirmed his character. This was 10 years before his imprisonment as a racketeer.

Although Congress cannot grant titles of nobility, Americans generally are not forbidden from accepting them from foreign leaders. Popes, for example, have occasionally ennobled Roman Catholic Americans for charitable munificence. Thus New Jersey utilities magnate Philip Brady and his wife became the a duke and duchess. One Manhattan contractor became George, Marquis MacDonald. He received many papal and other decorations during his long, generous, and much-honored life. He also wore, in lieu of formal attire, the ornate uniforms to which several of his honors entitled him, once leading a valet to murmur, “Launching the battleship again, eh, Sir?”

Americans like to believe honors reward personal merits and distinction. In fact, honors have been sold since at least 193, when the Pretorian Guard auctioned the title of emperor to Marcus Didius Julianus. More recently, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George sold titles of nobility to major campaign contributors through an agent, Arthur Maundy Gregory, a failed theater producer, hack journalist, spy, and confidence man. Gregory, who even published a price list, appears in A.J.A. Symons’s minor classic “The Quest for Corvo,” “habitually [carrying] about with him a wad of banknotes the size of a newly born baby’s head.”

In this country, generous campaign contributions have long led cheerful givers to ambassadorial appointments. Larry Lawrence’s $10 million in donations to the Democratic Party yielded an ambassadorship and, in 1997, a brief resting place among the honored dead at Arlington – before his World War II service claims were found to be fraudulent. Then they ripped him out of the ground with a backhoe.

Some lowlifes simply buy and wear medals without authorization. The Armed Services consider this so disgraceful that in 1996, Admiral Jeffrey Boorda, chief of naval operations, shot himself after Newsweek reported he had worn a decoration to which he was not entitled. A few years ago, HLI Lordship Industries of Hauppauge, N.Y., the contractor that manufactured Medals of Honor and other gongs for the Defense Department, was banned from future contracts: Employees had sold some 300 extras out the back door to wannabes, like Chicago judge Michael F. O’Brien, a phony hero who wore his unearned Medal of Honor in Veterans Day parades.

Finally, there are bogus noblemen. Prince Robert de Rohan-Courtenay, of Guthrie, Okla., claimed to be de jure Emperor of Byzantium. Profiled by Joseph Mitchell and photographed by Diane Arbus in top hat, cane, and medal-encrusted frock coat, the self-proclaimed “Successor of the Apostles in the God-Protected Throne of the Christian East” exemplified what the sociologists call dependent individualism: Rather than work for a living, he lived off welfare in a Times Square fleabag hotel. From 1970, Prince Robert M.N.G. Bassaraba de Brancovan-Khimchiachvili-Dadiani ran a bogus Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta from his faux-marble apartment (filled with equally genuine Louis XV furniture) at 116 Central Park South. If you had a passage fee, he had a gong for you, and hundreds of men and women with more money than sense each paid him up to $30,000 for his phony knighthoods.

Prince Robert styled himself an “Imperial and Royal Highness.” This is not bad: A Roman Catholic cardinal is merely an eminence. In a program for one of his ceremonies, held at Manhattan’s Christ Church, he described himself as “Grand Master, Grand Chancellor, Grand Bailiff, and Grand Prior of the Knights of Malta.” This was a few years before the prince vanished after his 2001 indictment for wire fraud.