America's Secret Aristocracy Read online

  America’s Secret Aristocracy

  Stephen Birmingham

  For Carol Brandt Pavenstedt in memory

  CONTENTS

  Part One FIRST PEERS OF THE REALM

  Chapter 1 Telling Them Apart

  Chapter 2 A Royal Wedding

  Chapter 3 Manor Lords

  Chapter 4 Ancient Wealth

  Chapter 5 A Gentleman’s War

  Chapter 6 Coronation in New York

  Chapter 7 The Great Silverware Robbery

  Chapter 8 From Camping Out with Indians … to Dinner at the Jays’

  Chapter 9 Livingston Versus Livingston

  Chapter 10 Weak Blood

  Chapter 11 Morrises and More Morrises

  Chapter 12 Outsiders

  Chapter 13 Endangered Species

  Part Two BRAHMINS, KNIGHTS OF THE CHIVALRY, AND CALIFORNIA GRANDEES

  Chapter 14 Knowing One’s Place

  Chapter 15 O Ancestors!

  Chapter 16 Beer and the Bourgeoisie

  Chapter 17 O Pioneers!

  Part Three HEIRS APPARENT

  Chapter 18 Secret Society

  Chapter 19 Old Guard Versus New

  Chapter 20 The Gospel of Wealth

  Chapter 21 Comme Il Faut

  Chapter 22 “To Serve …”

  Chapter 23 The Bogus Versus the Real

  Chapter 24 Family Curses

  Chapter 25 The Great Splurge

  Chapter 26 The Family Place

  Image Gallery

  A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Index

  PART ONE

  First Peers of the Realm

  1

  Telling Them Apart

  Whenever you hear an American speak of a terrace rather than a patio, of a house rather than a home or an apartment, of a sofa rather than a davenport or couch, of curtains rather than drapes, of guests for dinner rather than company, of a long dress rather than a formal, of a dinner jacket rather than a tuxedo, and of underwear rather than lingerie, chances are you are in the presence of a member of the American upper class. Upperclass Americans use the toilet, not the lavatory or the commode or the facilities or the loo or the little boys’ room. Upperclass Americans go to boarding schools, not prep schools, where they earn grades, not marks. Upperclass Americans are either rich (not wealthy) or poor (not less well-off), and the prices they pay for things are either high (not expensive) or cheap (not inexpensive). Upperclass Americans say “Hello,” not “Pleased to meet you,” and “What?” not “Pardon me?” Upperclass American women do not have bosoms. They have breasts, or even tits when they are among their own kind, when other vulgarisms frequently emerge. The familiar four-letter word for sexual intercourse is a perfectly acceptable upperclass expression.

  Brevity, simplicity, and the avoidance of euphemism are the chief hallmarks of the upperclass American vocabulary. When an upperclass American feels sick, he says just that, and never “I feel ill” or “I feel nauseous.” Cuteness is anathema. Thus in an upperclass 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. Upperclass 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 upperclass American a tomato is a tomayto, not a tomahto. Upperclass Americans write “R.S.V.P.” on the corners of their invitations, never “The favor of a reply is requested.” Upperclass 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 upperclass behavior that are easy to learn. For example, when upperclass 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 upperclass 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 upperclass 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 upperclass schools and colleges, with their special upperclass designations:

  Actual Name

  The Taft School

  The Hotchkiss School

  St. Mark’s School

  St. Paul’s School

  Miss Porter’s School

  The Foxcroft School

  The Ethel Walker School

  Choate—Rosemary Hall School

  Smith College

  Vassar College

  Upperclass Designation

  Watertown

  Lakeville

  Southborough

  Concord

  Farmington

  Virginia
r />   Simsbury

  Wallingford

  Northampton

  Poughkeepsie

  But even more important and difficult than remembering names and their ancient associations with cities is mastering the American upperclass accent. Just as in England, where class is defined by accent, the American aristocracy has developed an accent peculiar to itself. It is a curious hybrid derived, in part, from the flat vowel sounds of New England, as well as from the New York accent that is sometimes described as “Brooklynese,” with random borrowings from the drawl of the antebellum South. From the South comes a tendency to drop final consonants—as in “somethin’” or “anythin’”—or to elide initial letters in words such as “them,” which makes a statement such as “I can’t think of anything to give them” sound very much like “I cahnt think o’ anythin’ to give ’em.” Final r’s are also dropped, whereby paper comes out “papuh,” and rear is “reah.” Interior r’s are elided as well, so that apart becomes “apaht,” and church becomes “chuhch.” Final s’s are almost, but not quite, lisped, so that the word birds is pronounced something like “budzh.” Perhaps most difficult to master are the vowel sounds in simple words like were, where the audible vowel sound of the e almost sounds like the i in prism. On top of this, particularly among men, there has long been something called the boarding school stammer, a speech pattern whose origins are unclear but which may descend from the British public school stammer: “I—uh—oh, I say—wha-what would you say to—uh—,” et cetera.

  In perfecting an American upperclass accent, one rule to remember is the upperclass injunction to keep a stiff upper lip. The upper lip moves very little in American upperclass 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 upperclass 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 upperclass 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 up
perclass Americans look on upperclass 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.