America's Secret Aristocracy Read online

  While all this was going on, the Brahmins watched with increasing dismay as, by dint of their sheer numbers, the Irish began assuming political power in the city. Soon Irish names were appearing on the city’s board of aldermen, and Harvard, of all places, went so far as to award an honorary doctorate to the Catholic bishop of Boston. Faced with such encroachment upon their formerly sacred territory, many Brahmins simply elected to move out of town. The still-Brahmin suburban enclaves of Dover, Marblehead, and Pride’s Crossing are a result of this emigration and date from this turbulent century.

  Today, though some Brahmins have moved away and others have quietly gone underground, there are still others who are manfully struggling to regain their lost political leadership of the city, which they continue to see as their God-given right and destiny. One of these is fiftyish Mr. John Sears, a descendant of a long line of Brahmin Searses, who still believes he has a chance to become another in a long line of Boston Brahmin mayors of the city. To be sure, Sears was overwhelmingly defeated in 1982 by the Greek-descended Michael Dukakis. On the other hand, in an earlier election, Sears lost a mayoralty race against Kevin White by a mere eight hundred votes.

  The Brahmin spirit lives on, and so does the shabby-genteel Brahmin style of living. Mr. Sears’s digs on Acorn Street, in the eighteenth-century brick-and-cobblestone heart of Beacon Hill, are a small town house filled with aristocratic clutter and smelling faintly of dust and ancient book bindings. On one bookshelf are 220-year-old copies of Thomas Hutchinson’s History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. In the kitchen, where Mr. Sears sees no reason he should not entertain a guest, ancient rum bottles are displayed, each emblazoned with the Sears family crest. The Sears walls are crowded with yellowing family photographs—including several of Richard Sears, who was America’s first national tennis champion—and nineteenth-century oil portraits. There is also a rubbing from a sixteenth-century brass plaque that was discovered on a church in Colchester, England, depicting a 400-year-old Sears patriarch with his wife, three sons, and a daughter. “I’ve been able to trace the ancestries of everyone in this picture,” Mr. Sears told a visitor not long ago, “except this one,” pointing to the third figure from the right, who looked as though he might be the oldest son. “We just can’t seem to figure out what happened to him.” As he talked, Mr. Sears sipped a tot of rum—the family drink, and the source of the family fortune—out of a cracked, cream-colored jar that had originally contained English marmalade. His wife, it must be inferred, does not buy her hats. She has them.

  In New York, meanwhile, the phenomenon of Brahminism simply could not have occurred. New York could not afford to indulge in the kind of xenophobia that characterized the Brahmins. Just as New Yorkers today come largely from somewhere else, so did New York’s first families—from England, Scotland, France, Germany, Ireland, and Holland. By the mid-seventeenth century, New York was also home to America’s first Jewish population of any significance, families who had made their way out of Spain and Portugal, via Holland and South America, to the New World. Though Governor Peter Stuyvesant tried, briefly, to homogenize the city under the mantle of the Dutch Reform Church, it didn’t work. The colony’s population was already too diffuse, too many foreign languages were being spoken, and too many foreign currencies were in circulation. This helps explain why, when the Dutch surrendered Nieuw Amsterdam to British rule, the old Dutch families did not become second-class citizens. On the contrary, Van Rensselaers, Verplancks, and Van Cortlandts went right on marrying Jays, Livingstons, Morrises, and Schieffelins as they had been doing all along, creating a more tolerant, polyglot aristocracy.

  In Philadelphia, on the other hand, barely a hundred miles away, it was all very different. Just as old Bostonians are very Bostonian in their outlook, Philadelphia is defined by Philadelphians, but there any similarity between the two cities ends. Boston was founded by Puritans, Philadelphia by Quakers. Philadelphia was shaped by a tolerant, democratic, anti-intellectual community that was open to all. Boston was based on intellectual excellence and business competitiveness. In Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, it was considered evil to strive. And so Boston produced Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, along with veritable legions of Adamses, Saltonstalls, and Lodges. But Philadelphia didn’t. Instead, it produced genteel, well-mannered, and mild-spoken generations of Chews, Ingersolls, and Cadwaladers who were devoted, more than anything else, to what is called gracious living. Later, when Boston was fretting over an invasion of Irish peasantry, Philadelphia was preening itself over the fact that the roadbed of the Pennsylvania Railroad was regarded as the smoothest in the nation. The University of Pennsylvania, beloved by old Philadelphians, is not now, nor has it ever been, a Harvard, nor has it produced the caliber of graduates that Harvard has—the educators, the political and business leaders, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winners. On the other hand, Philadelphians can boast, with justification, that Penn has by far the lovelier campus.

  Given Philadelphia’s anti-intellectual origins, it is not surprising that Philadelphia’s upper crust should place more emphasis on form than on substance. A certain air of unreality also obtains. In Philadelphia, for instance, one grows accustomed to hearing—and leaving unchallenged—the assertion that “Philadelphia is the second-largest city in America,” even though it isn’t, if indeed it may have been, once upon a time. One hears other comments that New Yorkers, or even Bostonians, for that matter, would find incomprehensible, such as when Philadelphia’s Mrs. George Brooke Roberts announced not long ago that “Philadelphia was the first city in America to omit the sherry with the soup course.” She said this, furthermore, with as much pride and conviction as she would have if declaring that Philadelphia had been proclaimed the unequivocal national winner of the war on poverty, drugs, and crime. And, speaking of Boston—a city with which Philadelphia is often compared, to the displeasure of Philadelphians—the late Miss Anna Warren Ingersoll once made this mystifying observation: “In Boston, one never gets enough to eat.”

  On the other hand, when one thinks about it, one sees Miss Ingersoll’s point. Compared with Boston’s elite and its legendary fondness for scrod, cod, and baked beans, Philadelphia’s aristocracy is proud of the sumptuous tables it sets, with menus featuring such delicacies as Maryland soft-shell crab, terrapin, and canvasback duck.

  The Ingersolls, meanwhile, are an archetypal Old Guard Philadelphia family. Pre-Revolutionary, the Ingersolls predate in eminence the better-known Biddies. In fact, in Philadelphia there is a fond saying that, “When a Biddle is drunk, he thinks he’s an Ingersoll.” All Philadelphia Ingersolls descend from Jared Ingersoll, Jr., the son of His Majesty’s agent in Connecticut, who, after graduating from Yale in 1765, came down to Philadelphia to read law under Joseph Reed. During the war, he was finishing his education in London at the Inner Temple. Upon returning to Philadelphia, he became the city’s leading lawyer, numbering Robert Morris and Stephen Girard among his clients. According to Charles A. Beard, Jared Ingersoll’s practice “was larger than any others … his opinions were taken on all important controversies, his services engaged in every litigation.”

  Since then, the Ingersolls have been almost relentlessly uncolorful, producing generation after generation of staid and worthy Philadelphia lawyers. In the woodsy “outburb” of Penllyn today there is what amounts to an Ingersoll family compound. Here, in a series of widely spaced brick and stone mansions, live, among other family members, Mrs. Charles E. Ingersoll, Mrs. George F. Ingersoll, Mrs. John H. W. Ingersoll, Mrs. Robert S. Ingersoll, Jr., dowagers all, and, until her recent death at a venerable age, the clan’s dowager spinster, Miss Anna. The Ingersoll widows’ houses are connected by a series of long, graveled drives whose pebbles appear to be of identical size and color, and so much attention is paid to appearances here that two black gentlemen do nothing all day but rake the Ingersoll gravel back into place after a motor vehicle has passed, erasing the tire marks—somethin
g that would be considered an outrageous extravagance in Boston.

  True Philadelphians—and the word is always stressed in such a way as to differentiate those who are “of Philadelphia” from those who are not—do not sip their drinks out of old marmalade jars. On the other hand, they can be equally disdainful of fuss over matters that might be regarded as mere politesse. Miss Anna Ingersoll mixed her martinis by adding a splash of vermouth to a partly filled gin bottle, shaking the mixture vigorously, and pouring the result into glasses at room temperature. At her dinner table, her antique silver service was arrayed at the sides of each plate with xylophone-like precision—silver of that creamy luster that can come only from daily polishing. And yet, at the center of the table, there was always a bottle of Heinz’s catsup and a jar of French’s ballpark mustard. And the napkins were paper.

  Philadelphians, the eminent University of Pennsylvania sociologist and historian E. Digby Baltzell has suggested, can seem to outsiders so proper and beautifully mannered that they also appear insular and smug. Indeed, a number of leading American corporations, including IBM, Gulf & Western, and Exxon, have had trouble placing top executives in Philadelphia. Their wives find the social atmosphere too inbred and frosty and have trouble making friends. But Philadelphians would not have it any other way. To them, the people perfectly fit the place.

  Another city where the place seems to characterize the aristocrats, rather than the other way around, is Charleston, South Carolina. “Charleston,” as any visitor to this city will be told at least a dozen times before they leave, “is where the Ashley River and the Cooper River meet to form the Atlantic Ocean.” The gentle humor of this local adage, along with the gentle sounds of the two rivers’ names (“Flow gently, sweet Ashley …”), is in perfect keeping with the gentleness and softness of the city’s mood—a city of gentlefolk. The saying also conveys the city’s quiet pride in its conviction that if Charleston is not the center of the civilized universe, it somehow ought to be. This feeling persists here, even though, to most travelers along the Northeast Corridor, Charleston seems somewhat off the beaten track.

  A lively discussion can be generated in Charleston these days on the subject of whether Charlestonians are or are not in imminent danger of losing their distinctive regional accent. If they are, the villain will be that ubiquitous medium, television, which seems bent—to Charlestonians, at least—on getting everybody to talk like Californians. Charlestonians treasure their accent almost as much as they treasure their city’s reputation for gentility, and yet it, like so many other institutions nowadays, seems threatened by people who, as they say here, are from “off.” The Charleston accent is hard to describe, and it is said that only native Charlestonians can recognize it when other natives speak it. Its vowel sounds are flattened, somewhat like those of New England, and there are certain elisions—“li’l” for “little,” for example. And the “r” sound is never heard in the word “Charleston.” But it is definitely not a southern drawl. One woman describes it as “like a Boston accent, but a little slower and softer,” and that is as good a description of it as any. Are Charlestonians about to lose their accent? Here, of course, most people fervently hope not, and some say that, instead, Charlestonians are becoming fluent in two modes of speech. As one man says, “The minute I leave town, I lose the accent completely. But the minute I come back, I pick it right up again.”

  Charleston has been called the most aristocratic city in America, and it may well be. It is here, enshrined in a countinghouse on Broad Street, that the first cannonball fired on Fort Sumter from the Charleston Battery reposes under a plaque stating that this was the shot that started the “War of Northern Aggression.” It was here, also, that shots from the Union side at Fort Sumter came back, showing that the fort was still fighting, and what is also called the “War of the Chivalry” would end up memorialized on a tablet beneath the portico of St. Philip’s Church, listing Charleston’s Confederate dead. The list is very long, and it is studied very carefully, because these dead were all Charleston gentlemen. The triumphant and the tragic mingle bittersweetly in this city of old houses, painted in the pale pastel colors of the Caribbean, their long, distinctive side verandas stretching at the perpendicular away from the city’s streets, the better to catch the ocean breezes in summertime.

  Charleston is, if nothing else, a reminder of two pertinent facts about America’s hidden aristocracy. The first is that an aristocracy is not necessarily snobbish, “exclusive,” or unfriendly and aloof to outsiders; it can, on the contrary, in its gentility be warm and welcoming to strangers, almost to the point of naiveté. The second is that an aristocracy does not necessarily have to be rich, since most of Charleston’s aristocrats are not.

  The notion of “the chivalry” is taken very seriously here. So is the notion of honor, or honour. Under the unwritten chivalric code, borrowed straight from that of medieval knights, a man must be brave, truthful, dutiful, and manly. A man’s word must be better than his bond, because his word cannot be insured. A promise, no matter how ill advised, must be kept. A woman’s name must never pass a man’s lips except in terms of respect, and a gentleman must be willing to fight for his country, his honor, or his lady. If he has wronged any other man, he must offer his life in expiation. It is belief in the chivalry that has kept Charleston proud and propped up through its “bright and bitter” days—the days when she ruled the South, and the days when she became the scapegoat of the nation, the city that had lost the war.

  The great Charleston families who uphold this great tradition are the Hugers and the Legarés (pronounced “You-gees” and “Luh-grees”), the Prioleaus, the Izards, the Pinckneys and Pringles, Ravenels, Rutledges, Middletons, Manigaults, and Gaillards, to name just a few of the proudest and oldest names that are also emblazoned on the entablature outside St. Philip’s, many of them struck down fighting for the Confederate nation while barely in their teens. Belief in the chivalry has stood Charleston in good stead through even more recent, more troubling times, such as when a young man named Gordon Langley Hall came to town in the 1950s.

  Hall was dapper and attractive, appeared to have some money, and claimed to be an Englishman. “He had an English accent,” says Jack Leland, a reporter for the Charleston News & Courier at the time, “and in this town an English accent is all you need to have everybody fall over you.” Gordon Langley Hall called himself a writer and, indeed, had published a book of boys’ fiction called Peter Jumping Horse about the adventures of an Indian youth. “He was also a great name-dropper,” says Jack Leland. “In New York, he claimed to be a good friend of the Whitneys, Isobel Whitney I think he said it was. That impressed folks here.” And so it was not long before Gordon Langley Hall was taken up by Charleston’s literary set, and it was not long after that that the Pringles, in their gracious Charlestonian innocence, had a dinner party for him. His social future among the Charleston aristocracy seemed assured.

  Hall also claimed to be “the adopted nephew” of Dame Margaret Rutherford, which managed to make him seem almost a titled personage. Typically of Charleston, none of these claims was checked. A man’s word, after all, was his word, and it was unthinkable that a gentleman would lie. And so Gordon Langley Hall’s social star continued to rise. He bought himself one of the “good” old Charleston houses on Society Street, entertained elegantly for the Pinckneys, Pringles, Manigaults, and others, and by 1953 he was perhaps the most popular young bachelor in Charleston.

  To be sure, a few faintly disquieting facts had emerged. For one thing, it appeared that Mr. Hall might be the town’s most popular bachelor, but he would not quite qualify as the town’s most eligible one. He seemed to be a homosexual, with a particular fondness for young black boys. A local grocer had refused to send a delivery boy to Hall’s house because of a certain incident. Still, Charleston aristocracy considered itself sophisticated enough and generous enough to overlook such a harmless peccadillo. What went on in Mr. Hall’s bedroom behind closed doors was certainly of n
o concern to social Charleston people, who considered it unseemly to repeat such gossip, anyway.

  Then, in 1953, a more serious incident occurred. In England, Princess Margaret had become romantically involved with Group Captain Peter Townsend, not only a man quite a few years her senior but also a man who had been divorced. News of the romance, and of the royal family’s upset over it, had begun appearing in American newspapers. Gordon Langley Hall at this point presented himself to his friend and next-door neighbor Peter Manigault, the president and publisher of the News & Courier, with a proposal. He was, Hall said, a close personal friend of both Princess Margaret and Captain Townsend, and he would be delighted to write a series of intimate articles on the pair who were rocking the foundations of the Crown as it had not been rocked since the days of Wallis Warfield Simpson. Manigault, sensing a scoop of sorts, eagerly agreed, and Hall was given the assignment. When Hall’s stories began appearing, they naturally came to the attention of the news syndicates, and it was not long before the aristocratic Peter Manigault had a telephone call from a friend with United Press International. Not only did Hall’s stories appear to be fiction, Mr. Manigault was told, but Buckingham Palace had been contacted and an equerry of the princess had replied that Princess Margaret had never met a person named Gordon Langley Hall and, in fact, had never heard of him. Peter Manigault canceled the series of articles and sat back to lick his wounds. The chivalric code had been seriously violated.

  This episode prompted Jack Leland, at the newspaper, to check on the Dame Margaret Rutherford story. Dame Margaret replied that, yes, she had met Gordon Langley Hall once or twice, but that he was certainly not her nephew, adopted or otherwise. Once more, Charleston wondered about Gordon Langley Hall, but once again the doubts were dismissed. He seemed such a nice young man. Perhaps such vagaries should be forgiven and forgotten. After all, everyone occasionally makes mistakes.