America's Secret Aristocracy (2 page)

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, on getting ahead, on rising economically and socially, on climbing, as it were. As a nation of social climbers, we are often eager to forget, or even deny, the past. The majority of Americans, after all, descend from humble immigrant beginnings, and to them the past seems to have almost nothing to say. The yellowing photograph of Grandma in her poke bonnet, plucking a chicken on the porch of her little farmhouse in Indiana, seems at best quaint and at worst embarrassing. What does it tell us other than that Grandma could pluck a chicken, shell peas, or candle an egg? How could Grandma even address herself to what her descendants have become: lawyers, doctors, college professors, corporate executives, media stars, owners of condominiums in Florida, and members of the country club? More important than Grandma's photograph is tomorrow's promotion, tomorrow's contract, tomorrow's party, next winter's Caribbean cruise.

But the American aristocracy feels just the opposite. Ancestry as well as kinship maintains upper-class cohesion. Distinguished family members of the past, moreover, are intended to inspire each new generation to lead a family into new arenas of distinction. Ancestors are cautionary figures, teachers, exemplars. They warn the children: “Do not let the family down.” Timothy F. Beard of New York, who is president of the Order of Colonial Lords of Manors in America—the leading genealogical society in the country—recalls the words of an elderly cousin of his grandfather's, who warned him, “Don't lose the past. Most people don't even know the meaning of it. But don't be like the potato, with the best of you underground.” The elderly cousin bore the imposing name of Mrs. Philadelphia Anna Stewart-Monteith Vines, and her mother-in-law was also a Stewart-Monteith, who could trace her descent from Henry VII.

Both the British and the American aristocracies detest publicity, which they see as a double-edged sword, even though publicity is what most of American “society” today is based on: items in the gossip columns, photographs in
Vogue, Harper's
Bazaar
, and
Town & Country
. But here the parallels between the British and the American aristocracies come to an end. In England, the aristocracy has become, in a real sense, the property of the British public, which theoretically could vote it out of existence tomorrow. As a result, everything that the aristocracy does, for good or ill, becomes the property of the public media. Even the queen of England can do nothing to prevent the vagaries of her children and other relatives from being reported in the press when they occur. Often the press office at Buckingham Palace takes on the aspect of an armed camp as staffers try to hold off the press, deny the rumors, and put the best possible face on things.

In the United States, the aristocracy no longer has this problem. It has been allowed to retire into the privacy, even secrecy, that it much prefers, and it is even grateful for the new breed of society, which thrives on publicity and cannot seem to exist without it, for having drawn the attention of the media away.

Who, then, are these people? Over the years, numerous attempts to codify, sort out, and list the members of the American aristocracy have been made, but nearly always without success. Americans, it seems, love to study lists, and thousands of volumes of
Who's Who
, the
Social Register
, and the
List of Society
have been published, with none of them approaching the fixity and accuracy of a
Burke's Peerage
. The most famous list of all was probably Ward McAllister's of the top Four Hundred, who were invited to Mrs. William Astor's ball in February of 1892. The list, when it was finally published, was something of a disappointment. For one thing, barely more than three hundred names were on it. For another, though a smattering of Old Knickerbocker names were included, Mrs. Astor's guest list seemed quite top-heavy with self-made railroad tycoons and their wives and other robber barons who had made questionable “Civil War Money.” The old American aristocracy that had been in place for two hundred years before Mrs. Astor's ball seemed to have been able to resist even that notoriously bullheaded hostess's invitations.

In 1937, Ferdinand Lundberg published a controversial book called
America's 60 Families
in which he argued, cogently enough, that the most important American institutions—from schools and colleges, through the news and entertainment media, to Wall Street and the White House—were firmly in
the grip of a handful of interrelated entrepreneurial families, from the Astors to the Vanderbilts and Wideners. What Lundberg was talking about, of course, was a plutocracy, a hidden government by the moneyed, and he made a well-documented point. But he was not talking about “society,” or those who set the social tone as, in an aristocracy, the elite class does.