America's Secret Aristocracy Read online

  Hall’s next move was even more bizarre. This was to announce to his social Charleston friends that he was going to have a sex-change operation. It was almost as though Hall were trying to test this most tolerant and indulgent group of people to see how much outrageous behavior he could get away with and still be included within their charmed circle. The answer seemed to be that he could get away with quite a bit. Of course, some people were privately appalled. But Charlestonians shock in a quiet and tasteful way, and the final consensus seemed to be that this development, again, should be treated as a personal matter, and that it was not up to Charleston’s leaders to be judgmental about it. The Charlestonian code dictated that, once a man had been accepted as their friend, he would always be treated as a friend, even after he had decided to become a lady. Hall departed for Johns Hopkins University Hospital, where the operation or series of operations was performed, and when he returned to Charleston he was a she with a new name: Dawn Pepita Langley Hall. Social Charleston welcomed the new woman back into its fold with its customary hospitality.

  In 1959, Dawn Langley Hall announced her engagement to one John Paul Simmons, described in the announcement as “a Charleston engineer.” This was not quite true. John Paul Simmons was a mechanic at a local service station. Also, John Paul Simmons was black.

  At last, the newly created Miss Hall had gone too far. Once a year, in the spring, Charlestonians who own historic houses open their homes and gardens for “house tour,” in order that the general public and tourists can see how Charleston’s gentry lives. It is deemed a great honor to have one’s house placed on house tour. That year, the Hall house on Society Street was conspicuously absent from the list of houses to be toured. The curtain had finally fallen on Dawn/Gordon Langley Hall, and when the curtain falls in Charleston, it falls forever. With a collective sigh of relief, Charleston went about the business of trying to forget that such a person had ever existed.

  Charleston’s aristocracy does not go in much for vindictiveness. In fact, the worst punishment that social Charleston can mete out is so severe that, to anyone’s knowledge, it has never been administered. This would be to be “dropped from St. Cecilia.” (Since Charleston has never had a Social Register, no one can be dropped from that.) Charleston’s St. Cecilia Society and the annual ball it presents represent one of the most rigidly erected social bastions in America. Like the Philadelphia Assembly and the Baltimore Cotillon—aristocratically spelled with but a single i—the St. Cecilia Ball is also one of the country’s oldest social institutions. The society was first organized in 1737 as an amateur concert society and, little by little, became more interested in putting on balls than in presenting concerts until, in 1822, the concerts were given up altogether and the ball became the society’s sole raison d’être.

  Like the Philadelphia Assembly and the Baltimore Cotillon, the St. Cecilia Ball is important because it codifies the Charleston aristocracy. It carves, as it were, the names of who is who in Charleston in stone. One is either a member of St. Cecilia or one is not, leaving the society hopelessly beyond the reach of social climbers. Charleston may welcome, and take in, outsiders like Gordon Langley Hall, but St. Cecilia membership is another thing altogether. As is the case in England, for a duke to entertain a viscount at dinner is hardly uncommon. But for a viscount to become a duke is next to impossible. As is peculiarly the case in America, on the other hand, the St. Cecilia Society is shrouded in secrecy. The list of its membership is neither carved in stone nor made public anywhere else, though the plaque in front of St. Philip’s Church is embossed with the family names that would most likely qualify as members. Only a St. Cecilia member would be able to tell you who the other members were, and this no member would ever do.

  More than eighty years ago, a Charleston aristocrat named Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel published a volume called Charleston: The Place and the People, an affectionate portrait of the city, in which she came closer than anyone else to revealing how the society works. Though Mrs. Ravenel has long ago been gathered to her Charleston ancestors, there are Charlestonians today who feel that she was a traitor to her class for telling as much as she did and that her book should have been suppressed for this reason alone. Of St. Cecilia’s membership, Mrs. Ravenel wrote:

  If a man’s father or grandfather, or any of his immediate kindred, have belonged before him, there is little doubt that he will be chosen. Nevertheless blackballs (two suffice to exclude) have fallen, when the applicant was a notoriously unworthy scion of his family tree. If a new resident, or of a family recently brought into notice, there will be inquiry, perhaps hesitation, and a good backing will be desirable. But if he be of character and standing calculated to make his membership acceptable to the Society, he will be elected,—unless he has some adversary; then he may fail. The presenter of such a one will make careful examination into public feeling before subjecting his friend to mortification; and will withhold the letter if in doubt. When a man is elected, the names of the ladies of his household are at once put upon “the list” and remain there forever. Only death or removal from the city erases them,—change of fortune affects them not at all.

  The St. Cecilia Society is a men’s club in the sense that its board of governors is all male, but it is more than that. Its ball is also a coming-out party to the extent that certain of each season’s debutantes are invited, but the majority of the female invitees are well beyond debutante years. What the ball is, most of all, is an exercise in nostalgia, a pleasant anachronism left over from antebellum times. It is an old-fashioned “card dance,” where the dance card of every lady in attendance is completely filled out well in advance. Only waltzes and slow fox trots are played, plus an occasional Charleston, and no Latin American music—and certainly no rock—has ever been heard at a St. Cecilia Ball. Other rules abound. Although champagne is served with supper, no other alcoholic beverages are served in the ballroom. Gentlemen may, and do, repair to a separate room and partake of a glass of wine—and hip flasks of more potent liquids have been known to appear in the gentlemen’s washroom—but ladies are not permitted to drink, not even wine, anywhere on the premises.

  No actors or actresses may attend the ball, even when they are out-of-town guests of members. Neither may a divorced woman, even if she was deemed the injured party in the action. A divorced man, on the other hand, may attend, provided he has not remarried. As for a young woman whose father is a member of the society, she may of course attend, provided she has not had the poor taste to marry a man who is a nonmember. In that case, she may attend, but neither her husband nor her children may do so. A young woman from “off” may be able to attend as an out-of-town guest of a member, provided she passes the careful “family background” check of the invitation committee. But if she has lived in Charleston for a year or longer, she is considered a resident, and no longer from off, and cannot attend. Young women have been known to spend eleven months a year in Charleston and the twelfth month elsewhere just to be able to qualify for the St. Cecilia Ball as out-of-town guests.

  The dance is held in a historic, if somewhat run-down, hall in downtown Charleston, and no photographers from newspapers or magazines have ever been permitted to photograph it, though many have tried. Everyone in town knows when the ball is to take place, but no mention of the event is ever made in the local newspaper. “They wouldn’t dare,” says one Charlestonian, but that isn’t quite true. The Manigault family, who own the News & Courier, have long been St. Cecilia members, and silence on the matter is part of the chivalric code. In fact, so touchy is the whole subject that some Charlestonians have been known to sit at home in darkened houses on the night of the ball, so that their neighbors will think they have gone to it. Others make elaborate arrangements to be out of town, in order to be able to say that they are “going to have to miss St. Cecilia.”

  Meanwhile, the ball itself is a vivid reminder that money alone means nothing in Charleston. It is perfectly acceptable for a Charleston woman to own just one St. Cecilia ball
gown, which she will wear to the party year after year and leave, for the remaining 364 days, packed away in tissue paper before passing it on to her daughter. And if a gentleman cannot afford white tie and tails, or even to rent a dinner jacket, a dark suit with a black bow tie is considered quite proper attire. For a gentleman to dress this way is even considered a part of the great chivalric tradition.

  “‘To be dropped from the St. Cecilia,’” Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel wrote, “is an awful possibility sometimes hinted at, but which (as far as known) has never come to pass.” Those words were penned in 1906. Eighty-one years later, it still has never come to pass, and the membership of St. Cecilia remains as fixed as the earth’s orbit around the sun. Even Mrs. Ravenel’s bit of tattling on the society did not get her family dropped.

  Charleston has other little jokes that it likes to tell visitors about itself. A local fertilizer factory emits a distant odor in one part of town, and when visitors comment on it, Charlestonians like to wink and say, “What you’re smelling is just the odor of our decaying aristocracy.” But, just as it isn’t quite true that the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet at Charleston to form the Atlantic Ocean, that quip isn’t quite true, either. Charleston’s aristocracy is not decaying. It’s still going strong.

  15

  O Ancestors!

  Of all the hundred-plus hereditary societies in the United States today—and which include such diverse organizations as the First Families of Ohio, the Piscataqua Pioneers, and the Swedish Colonial Society*—there are probably no two more prestigious, or more misunderstood, groups than the General Society of Mayflower Descendants and the Order of First Families of Virginia.

  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.)