America's Secret Aristocracy Read online

  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 upperclass 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.

  A dozen or so years earlier, in 1924, Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer had addressed that question in The Social Ladder. “Prominent today in published accounts of New York social events,” Mrs. Van Rensselaer wrote, “are the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Morgans, the Davidsons, the Belmonts, the Vanderlips, the Villards, the Goulds.” And yet, she pointed out, only one of these families had “enjoyed social recognition as far back as Civil War times.” That single exception was the Astors, and Mrs. Van Rensselaer dismissed the Astors rather loftily, commenting that “the first John Jacob Astor, born in Walldorf, Germany, came to New York … as a piano merchant.” She added that not one of the above “socially prominent families” traced its lineage in America back to the Revolutionary era, much less to an era prior to that.

  Today, a list of society’s elite might include the Rockefellers, the Fords, the Mellons, even the Annenbergs and Estée Lauder. These names, of course, represent even newer money. But for all the Rockefellers’ wealth, there are those today who can recall a time when Rockefellers were considered uncouth parvenus. Robert David Lion Gardiner remembers his grandmother forbidding him to play with the Rockefeller children. “No Gardiner will ever play,” she announced, “with the grandchildren of a gangster.” And the novelist Louis Auchincloss, whose own New York roots are deep, if not as deep as the Gardiners’, once commented, “We put the Rockefellers in the same category as the Vanderbilts. It was hard to take them seriously. Now, of course, that I’m married to a Vanderbilt, we take the Vanderbilts somewhat more seriously.” (Mr. Auchincloss’s wife’s mother is a Vanderbilt cousin.)

  Despite all this, it is clear that in order to claim membership in American society today there are essentially only two rather loose requirements: money, the more the better, and the ability to advertise oneself. And these requirements are linked, because publicity today has a price tag. It can be bought. In other words, society today has wandered almost as far from the concept of aristocracy as it is possible to stray—because, from its beginnings, America’s aristocracy has had almost nothing to do with money at all.

  “Society,” needless to say, is a tricky concept that has taken on d
ifferent meanings to different generations. In its American colonial beginnings, it meant, first of all, family. And the only demarcation lines within it were those of the prevailing churches. Indeed, members of the clergy—a profession in which one does not customarily grow rich—stood very close to the top of the social scale. Society was also a matter of breeding, which had less to do with ancestry than with integrity, probity, civic duty, respectability, kindness, and good manners, as well as of deportment, speech, and what is today called body language, through which members of society communicated with one another: the way one entered a room or rose from a chair or bowed or curtsied or blew a kiss. All these are components of that hard-to-define quality of any aristocracy known as noblesse oblige. Finally, society stood for culture and refinement, and an appreciation of art, music, and literature. In other words, America’s earliest aristocracy, like England’s, was based on family notions of self-worth and self-esteem.

  The founders of society in America were nearly all members of families who predated the arrival of the British fleet that turned Nieuw Amsterdam into New York. In her book, Mrs. Van Rensselaer offered a sampling of their names. She cited the Morrises, the Kings, the Gerards, the Houghs, the Hoyts, the Iselins, the Millers, the Wickershams, the Wyatts, the Fishes, the Whites, and the Magees. Modestly, she omitted her own name from this list. To it, she might have added the Livingstons, the Bownes, the Lawrences, the Schieffelins, the Burrs, the Schuylers, the Jays, the Ingersolls of Philadelphia, the Adamses of Boston, the Randolphs of Virginia, the Carrolls of Carrollton, Maryland, and many more.

  Certain old American families seem almost inextricably entwined with their cities of origin. The Adamses and Saltonstalls and Winthrops, for example, are both from and of Boston, while the Pinckneys are from and of Charleston, South Carolina. They belong to their cities just as persistently as, in their minds, their cities belong to them. Other families, by contrast, seem to transcend the places they originally came from, such as the intricately interrelated Livingston-Jay-Beekman-Astor family, who all descend from a common ancestor, the first Robert Livingston, who settled in New York’s Hudson River valley. Today, Livingstons are scattered across the face of the continent, from Florida to California. Others live in England, and some live as far away as Hong Kong. They are doctors, lawyers, bankers, congressmen (from states other than New York), diplomats, and interior designers. But wherever they are, and whatever they do, they are always, indelibly, Livingstons.

  The old families have never believed that either money or publicity was the open sesame to social success or acceptance. Its members did not believe that then, nor do they now. For these founding families of America’s aristocracy did not, as might be supposed, die out. Nor did they, through intermarriage with one another, become “watered down” to impotence and incompetence. In cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and Savannah, their descendants still exist, leading quiet and for the most part productive lives, doing useful and often important work. Ten, twelve, or more generations later, they still cling to the cities that first nourished them, being none the worse Americans for the fact that they boast an ancient heritage and lineage, nor for the fact that their lives and activities are no longer considered spectacular enough to qualify for the society pages and the gossip columns. These families, in other words, are not like a breed of dinosaurs that enjoy one great era and then become extinct.

  Nor do they sit in Brahmin-like seclusion in their quiet city houses on quiet city streets, contemplating their past or their family trees. The earliest Dutch and English settlers were people of stamina and grit who did not take easily to idleness or boredom; their descendants still do not. They are not, in the common sense, exclusive, nor do they form a fixed set that has erected impenetrable barriers behind which outsiders are never permitted to glimpse. On the contrary, they are for the most part open and friendly and perfectly willing to accept new acquaintances into their circle of friends, the only qualification being that the new friends should be willing to accept their standards of politeness and propriety, and behave as ladies and gentlemen.

  Members of the American aristocracy have long distrusted lists. One’s name on a list is an invasion of privacy, a threat to collective secrecy, an invitation to unwanted publicity or even notoriety. With their eyes on what the past has taught them, they can recall that it was bad publicity—really nothing else—that destroyed the brilliant political career of the aristocratic Aaron Burr in the early 1800s. Besides, they do not need a scorecard to tell them who their players are. In 1921, Maury Paul, the “Cholly Knickerbocker” gossip columnist for the old New York World, playfully drew up a set of lists in which he tried to separate two elements of society: the Old Guard and Cafe Society. On his Old Guard list, he included the name of Mrs. C. Oliver Iselin. No one would really have questioned whether Mrs. Iselin’s name belonged on that list. It did, but Mrs. Iselin was not amused. She wrote to the editor of the newspaper, whom she knew, and politely asked, “Please see to it that my name is removed from this list.”

  Even more important, the members of America’s aristocracy have an uncanny ability—through a kind of ESP or personal radar—to recognize each other. Antennae go out, and the signals are picked up. During the course of his military service in France, for instance, Goodhue Livingston found himself having lunch in the dining room ofthe L’Univers Hotel in Tours. During the course of it, he happened to notice another gentleman dining on the opposite side of the room. “I recognized the man as an American, of course,” he recalls today, “but I also knew I had never met him. And yet there was something very familiar about him, though it wasn’t even a ‘family look.’ After lunch, I stopped over to his table and introduced myself. ‘My name is Montgomery Livingston,’ the fellow said.”

  Even in such newly settled places as Texas, fledgling aristocracies are forming and developing secret signals by which they recognize each other. The Wynne family of Dallas now numbers more than 150 members and publishes its own private genealogical volume, Who’s Whose Wynne. At age twenty-one, each Wynne family member is presented with a distinctive family ring consisting of a trio of intertwined gold serpents of the Nile. Once a year, over Memorial Day weekend, the entire Wynne clan gathers for three days of festivities. These include feasting, all-night poker games, a Sunday worship service, and—the highlight of the reunion—the induction of new in-laws into the family. In Wynne family terminology, in-laws are called Mongooses, while blood members are known as Snakes—an allusion to the family ring and to the fact that, in nature, only a mongoose is a match for a cobra.

  But our story does not begin in Texas. It begins on the older-established East Coast and with the union of two linchpin American families, the Jays of Westchester County and the Livingstons of New York.

  2

  A Royal Wedding

  If there had been any national media to ballyhoo it at the time, it might have been called the Wedding of the Century. But the century was the eighteenth, and news in the American colonies traveled slowly and erratically, so that the announcement of the wedding that took place on April 28, 1774, did not appear in the New York Gazette until May 9. The announcement was appropriately subdued, in genteel keeping with the times, and merely noted the marriage of Mr. John Jay, “an eminent barrister,” to “the beautiful Sarah Livingston” at her parents’ country estate, Liberty Hall, in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. That was all.

  In a more outspoken era, it might have been noted that John Jay was something of an upstart in New York society, whereas the Livingstons were by then the principal family in New York—if not the principal family in all America. It was not a case of a pauper marrying a princess, exactly, and the phrase “social climber” had not yet been invented, but a more lurid press might have made more of the difference in status between the Jays and the Livingstons and of the fact that on the day John and Sarah Jay exchanged marriage vows, the eminent barrister had allied himself with the richest and most powerful family in the New World. I
n an age more rapaciously concerned with gossip and spicy trivia, the discrepancy between the bride’s and bridegroom’s ages might also have drawn comment. John Jay was twenty-eight. His bride was barely seventeen.

  Had there been a Suzy Knickerbocker or a Liz Smith around in those days, an edifying story might have been written about how cleverly John Jay had insinuated himself into the perfumed, private circle of the Livingston family and how carefully he had orchestrated his courtship—over her father’s initial objections—of the William Livingstons’ youngest, prettiest, and favorite daughter. There was even a minor scandal, involving an incident during the bridegroom’s college days (to say nothing of other scandals that lurked in the upper branches of the Livingston family tree), to be unearthed. But, as it was, in this more innocent and polite of times, when members of the upper classes were treated with deference and discretion as a matter of course, the Jay-Livingston nuptials were announced with the terse precision of an item in the London Court Circular.