America's Secret Aristocracy (24 page)

The Mayflower Descendants is the easier of the two societies to comprehend. It was organized in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on January 12, 1897, to celebrate the return to America from England that year of the history of Plymouth written by Governor William Bradford, titled
Of Plimoth Plantation
. Bradford's history had been uncovered at Fulham Palace in London, and after delicate negotiations with the Consistory Court of the Diocese of London—spearheaded by such American officials as U.S. Senator George F. Hoar—the document was finally on its way home. In genealogical circles, this was an event equivalent in importance to bringing the America's Cup back from Australia. Ever since, the Society of Mayflower Descendants has been busily gathering genealogical data on who, indeed, may qualify for membership in the society. As an indication of the enormity of the society's task, its first volume of researches did not appear until nearly a hundred years later, in 1973, and traced the descendants of
only five actual
Mayflower
passengers. It traced these lineages, furthermore, from the 1620 arrival of the ship only up to the time of the Revolution, or for roughly five generations. At this rate, it may be centuries before the society's heroic work is finished.

The General Society of Mayflower Descendants has very strict requirements as to who may join its membership. All members must be able to prove descent from one or more of twenty-three male
Mayflower
passengers. These are:

John Alden

Isaac Allerton

John Billington

William Bradford

William Brewster

Peter Brown

James Chilton

Francis Cooke

Edward Doty

Francis Eaton

Edward Fuller

Samuel Fuller

Stephen Hopkins

John Howland

Richard More

Degory Priest

Thomas Rogers

Henry Samson

George Soule

Myles Standish

Richard Warren

William White

Edward Winslow

This, of course, is not the full roster of
Mayflower
passengers, which ran to a hundred-odd names. Nor is it even the full list of men who signed the famous compact in the
Mayflower
's cabin, who were forty-one in number. But it is, the society implies, the list of the twenty-three “most important” men on the ship's passenger list. It excludes, among others, women and children. It also excludes eighteen passengers who arrived under the designation “Family Servants and Young Cousins.” It does include the eleven men who were
permitted—or permitted themselves—to use the honorific title of Mr., and a few more who used the slightly grander designation of Master. But it should be noted that none of the male
Mayflower
passengers used the title Gent. after his name, the equivalent of Esq. and an indication that the man was a person of property or education, or both.

To be fair, on the other hand, the Society of Mayflower Descendants has never claimed that its forebears were in any sense members of an aristocracy, or even of a moneyed upper class. The society's interest is simply in American history and genealogy. At the same time, the society is not above pointing out that a number of prominent and distinguished citizens are proven descendants of
Mayflower
passengers. These include Boston's Adams family, and both Adams presidents, as well as Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Zachary Taylor, both Roosevelt presidents, and William Howard Taft and all the Taft clan of Ohio. Thanks to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s, marriage to the former Abby Aldrich, all their children became
Mayflower
descendants, including the famous five brothers, John D. III, Nelson, Winthrop, Laurance, and David. Others with bona fide
Mayflower
antecedents include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the first Mrs. Jefferson Davis, and the bankers J. P. Morgan and George F. Baker. Grandma Moses was a
Mayflower
descendant, as are General Leonard Wood and Admiral Alan Shepard, the seventh man to walk on the moon and the first to use its surface for golf practice. Even Winston Churchill had an ancestor who was a
Mayflower
passenger.

But, without exception, the passengers themselves were a lowly lot, which even their descendants will usually acknowledge. In
The Fathers of New England
, Charles M. Andrews has stated the matter bluntly: “A group of English emigrants,” he writes, “more socially insignificant could hardly be imagined.… Their intellectual and material poverty, lack of business enterprise, unfavorable situation and defenseless position in the eyes of the law, rendered them an almost negative factor in the life of New England.” And the historian Bradford Smith, himself a descendant of the most notable of the Pilgrim Fathers, William Bradford, has said,

They were all working men, tailors, merchants, wool combers, weavers, sawyers, hatters, carpenters.… The false notion that they were noblemen … is especially
ironic in view of the fact that the chief distinction of the Pilgrims and their claim to our continual veneration is that they established a caste-free government of free men, making no attempt to duplicate the system of degree and station which existed in England and by which the leaders, if they had been smaller men, might well have hoped to advance in the new world.

The late social historian Dixon Wector agreed. “Almost without exception,” he wrote, “the first permanent settlers in America—F.F.V.'s,
Mayflower
passengers, Knickerbockers and Quakers—were drawn from the middle and lower classes, from the aggressive, the dissenter, the ne'er-do-well, the underprivileged and the maladjusted.… As has often been said, ‘Dukes don't emigrate.'”

And yet the very fact that out of this ragtag and bobtail group of Pilgrim Fathers came men and women who would become business, political, and social leaders may account for the continuing appeal of claiming
Mayflower
ancestry on the part of Americans. The
Mayflower
and its scruffy load seem to encapsulate the American dream of the self-made man in an alien land—the dream of every immigrant since—and to embody the moral of the Horatio Alger success story, that every Tattered Tom and Ragged Dick can go from rags to riches in America if he is diligent enough, resourceful enough, toils hard and honestly enough. Since its founding, the Society of Mayflower Descendants has continued to grow in numbers. Today, there are society chapters in all of the fifty states. By 1960, there were 11,000 S.M.D. members, by 1970 there were more than 14,000, and by the 1980s membership was pushing close to 20,000. It has been estimated by Walter Merriam Pratt of Massachusetts, a governor general of the society, that “some three or four
hundred
thousand could be members, but they just don't know it.” Thus have the descendants of twenty-three humble and for the most part illiterate men become a significant part of the American population.

Most members of the Mayflower Society take it very seriously (William Howard Taft applied for membership when he became president). But, because of the organization's size and the general lowliness of the Pilgrim Fathers' family backgrounds, the society has also been the subject of some celebrated aristocratic put-downs. Boston's famous Mrs. Isabella
Stewart Gardner, for example, wearying of a friend's recital of her
Mayflower
antecedents, commented, “Well, I understand the immigration laws are much stricter nowadays.” And Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, when asked whether her ancestors had arrived on the
Mayflower
, is said to have replied, “Oh, no. We sent our servants on that. We came over on the second boat.” Actually, if this tale is true, Mrs. Otis had a point. The second boat to arrive at the Plymouth Colony, the
Arabella
, carried a more distinguished passenger list, including the first member of the American Whitney family and Sir Richard Saltonstall, a nephew of the lord mayor of London and the progenitor of the only American family to have produced eleven unbroken generations of Harvard men and no fewer than eight governors of Massachusetts. Yet no Society of Arabella Descendants exists, which is perfectly all right with the Mayflower Society. “The Mayflower Society,” insists Walter Merriam Pratt, “is not interested in the wealth of its members, or their social standing, or their politics. The Pilgrims believed in the equality of all men.”

As for the Order of First Families of Virginia, the story is a little different. Officially, membership in the F.F.V. is restricted to individuals who are “lineal descendants of an ancestor who aided in the establishment of the first permanent English Colony, Virginia 1607–1624.” This means that, contrary to popular assumption, neither the Randolphs nor the Lees qualify as F.F.V.'s, since both families arrived later. (The Lees, meanwhile, have their own hereditary society—the only American family to do so—the Society of the Lees of Virginia, composed of descendants of Richard Lee and his wife, Anne Constable Lee, who came to Virginia in 1639.)

But, beyond this, the ancestral claims of the F.F.V.'s become somewhat murky. F.F.V. members like to point out that not only did their forebears arrive on American shores thirteen years earlier than the
Mayflower
, but also that these men were of a more patrician background. To prove it, they note that of the 105 men in the original Jamestown expedition of 1607, no fewer than 35 bore the all-important appellation of Gent. attached to their names, and that out of the 295 men who were actually counted as founders of Jamestown, 92 were listed as gentlemen on contemporary records. Furthermore, certain F.F.V.'s have attempted to fancify and romanticize some of their antecedents' occupations. For example, the earliest American ancestor of the Byrd family was listed
as a “goldsmith.” Not content with the fact that a goldsmith might have been socially a step or two above a blacksmith, the Byrds have argued that “goldsmith” was “an old expression for banker.”

But serious historians have disputed all this. In
The First Gentlemen of Virginia
, Louis B. Wright has said,

Of the background of most of the settlers who were careful to sign themselves “Gent.” we know next to nothing.… The cold truth is that the English origins of nearly all of the colonists, even those who founded aristocratic families, are unknown.… Though the First Families of Virginia may have in their veins the bluest blood in all England, the proof of their descent will rarely stand in either a court of law or a council of scholars.

There are other problems with the F.F.V.'s involving arithmetic. Of the original 105 Jamestown colonists, for instance, not a single one appears to have left a descendant of any sort in Virginia. In the arduous years that followed, from 1607 to 1610, during which some 800 additional settlers arrived, came the so-called starving times. Despite the introduction of such crops as carrots, parsnips, and turnips, hundreds of colonists died of starvation and malnutrition, while others tried to sustain themselves on a diet of cattail roots, marsh marigolds, Jerusalem artichokes, and other wild plants. By 1609, having buried more than 500 of their men, women, and children, the Virginia colony had been reduced to just 67 souls, and by 1610 the colonists were prepared to abandon Virginia and try their luck in Newfoundland. Indeed, the survivors were headed down the James River when they encountered the
Virginia
coming upriver with 150 new settlers and new supplies. With this new blood, the colony's population rose to about 200. And yet, of these, only five are known to have left descendants in Virginia. And so the First Families of Virginia today are not properly the descendants of the first colonists, but the descendants of the first families who came to wealth and power—Lees, Randolphs, Fairfaxes, Peytons—after the colony, and its damp, malarial climate, had been conquered. Or, as James Truslow Adams put it, “There was not a gentleman of leisure in Virginia
until well after 1700—unless he were a jailbird or a redskin.”
*

The idea that personal identity and worth can be achieved through a continuity of ancestors seems as old as man himself, and the notion that traits could be absorbed from one generation by the next existed long before the science of genetics. It goes beyond atavism. There are even echoes of cannibalism here. In fact, many cannibal societies believed that by eating the flesh of their fiercest and bravest enemies, the fierceness and bravery of those enemies would enter their own bodies, and those of their children, and be perpetuated within the tribe forever. In the fifth century
B.C.
, Herodotus wrote of certain Scythian tribesmen who ritually devoured their own parents. When the patriarch of a family grew old and venerable, he was sent up into a tree and made to hang from a limb by his hands. The tree was then shaken by his young sons and family members. If the father did not fall, he was judged not ripe enough to be eaten. But if he fell, he was avidly consumed by his descendants in order to acquire and preserve the richness of the patriarch's wisdom and experience for future generations. It was considered a great honor to be eaten.

In older American cities, particularly in the South, old families have kept track of themselves, and their forebears, though without the aid of formal genealogical societies. In some places, the idea of genealogical codification is almost repugnant. A secret aristocracy, after all, ought to be kept just that, a family secret as closely guarded as how much money one is worth. Cities such as Charleston, New Orleans, and Savannah, for example, have little use for
The Hereditary Register of the United States
, a heavy, six-hundred-plus-page volume, published annually, that lists American hereditary societies, their officers and bylaws, a “Revolutionary War Ancestors' Honor Roll,” registered coats of arms, heraldic charges and symbolism, and other ephemera of family-treedom. Nor have these cities exhibited any interest in a
Social Register
, or any other kind of social list. In these cities, everybody knows who is socially acceptable and who is not. The family name is more than the symbol. It tells the whole story. Not long ago, the daughter-in-law of a Charleston Pinckney gave
birth to her first son, having already had two daughters. “Just think of it,” her mother-in-law exclaimed, “my first grandchild!” Affronted, her daughter-in-law asked her what she meant. “This one will carry on the
name,”
the baby's grandmother replied.