The American caste system

ALVA JOHNSTON

A consideration of the ways and means by which social distinction is achieved and noble lineage certified in the U. S.A.

The United States leads the Western nations in ancestor-worship and the complexity of its caste system. It is the first country to develop genealogy into an important industry. Aristocracies may be cracking up in Europe; here the Sons, Daughters, Descendants, Scions and Dames are organizing on a large scale for the first time. Their immediate purpose is to combat the Red menace. The Mayflower boys, the great-grandchildren of the Colonial Governors, the Cincinnati, the Holland Dames, the S.A.R., the D.A.R. and scores of other societies of descendants are holding furious anti-Red rallies in the great cities. It is the first time that the pedigreed groups have ever tried to weld themselves into a political bloc. The Reds have failed in their attempt to organize the masses in America, but they have caused the first general mobilization of the hereditary aristocracy.

It is an enlightment to the half-caste American to attend one of the great anti-Red rallies; to see the Descendants swarm in under their innumerable banners; to note the scores of rosettes, ribbons, pins, knobs, buttons, badges and bars that identified the blooded stock; to hear the delicate rustle of applause from indignant finger-tips, as orators scourge Stalin and rebuke American nonchalance with respect to the Red Terror. As long as the Descendants are fully occupied with their campaign against the Reds, the country is probably safe against both the Reds and the Descendants.

The Descendants, however, are wasting themselves. The depression has taken care of the Reds. American radicalism is a by-product of boom times. The only time the proletariat ever became mettlesome in the United States was in 1919, the climax of a long period of high wages and unlimited employment.

Communist propaganda collapsed when the market broke, and the Red parades and riots of the past year have been feeble and spiritless. Our radical movements are financed from the national pocket money and are among the first of the superfluities to be discarded when money is scarce. Even the usual thirdparty talk is not heard this year. The most reckless move that the nation contemplates is the possibility of going Democratic. However, fighting the Reds is good exercise for the Descendants. The Sons, Daughters, Scions and Dames are increasing rapidly because of the growing interest in genealogy; if they would quit attacking Red phantoms and grapple with real issues, such as corruption in municipal government or prohibition, the Descendants might play a serious part in American life as we know it.

There are three main groups of aristocracies in the United States: local aristocracies based on the long residence of solvent families in a given spot, occupational aristocracies and the national aristocracies based on descent from Colonial and Revolutionary stock. The first type is to be found everywhere. Old Families spring up on short notice. There are Old Families in Hollywood and probably in Muscle Shoals. The pre-oil families of Tulsa, Oklahoma, outrank the postoil families. The Great Fire of 1861 roughly divides the quality from the trash in Chicago. In parts of Utah the sons and grandsons of the polygamists take precedence over persons of monogamous lineage, and similar caste distinctions are to be found elsewhere. The Mayflower Descendants patronize the members of the Society of the Cincinnati; the Cincinnati lord it over the Sons of the American Revolution; the fine old Bleeding Kansas families look down on the people who came after the Great Grasshopper Plague.

The Old Families, even if only twenty or thirty years old, are the stablest form of caste. Occupational aristocracies rise and fall. Distinguished foreigners touring the country used to be entertained by the patent medicine caste; but the prestige of the great swamp root, vegetable compound, snake oil and liver pill families has been steadily waning, partly because of the great drug mergers. In minor cities the wholesaler and jobber were the feudal overlord and the retailers his vassals, socially and economically; but both orders have been practically extinguished by the chain stores. On the other hand, the famous beer and distillery houses still form a high caste, notwithstanding the changes in their industries.

The weakness of the third form of aristocracy, that of Colonial descendants, has been the tendency to split up into sub-aristocracies, to differ among themselves as to which is the higher nobility and to get sulky. The Colonial Dames are divided into two groups, both of which are said to be somewhat haughty to the D.A.R.; the descendants of the early Colonial Governors snub the descendants of the later Colonial Governors, and so on. Until recently, differences of opinion regarding the finer shades and nuances of ancestral merit have tended to prevent these organizations from exerting their combined influence in national affairs.

In the larger cities the caste system is further complicated by religious and racial factors and by matrimonial alliances with titles from Europe and the Black Sea Region. The situation is very complex in the American colony in New York City. Only a small portion of the New York families have been established in New York City for a great length of time. For three centuries the older residents have shown a tendency to move on as waves of immigration arrived, and the social life of the city has always undergone rapid change. Ward McAllister tried to stabilize the aristocracy, but his "400" did not last a season. The late Colonel Mann of the late Town Topics, in the height of his glory as the Northcliffe of society journalism, sought to establish a fixed aristocracy composed of those who loaned him money and did not ask to have it back. Later a society magazine conferred high birth in return for the purchase of a $250 block of its common stock. The Social Register is the ruling book of gentry, but the complaint is that it is growing as bulky as a Sears-Roebuck catalogue and threatens to provide aristocracy for all the people. In spite of the turn-over of population from decade to decade, there is still an hereditary upper caste in New York. There are Manhattan families which have married money in every generation for more than two centuries. They began by leading the fur money to the altar in the time of William and Mary, and since that time have successfully married the pirate and slave trade money, the whale oil, railroad, gold, silver, coal, iron, copper, electrical, automotive and oil money. It is useless for the West, Middle West and other sections to accumulate money, as New York will sooner or later acquire it by matrimony. Wall Street is accused of bleeding the country white, but it is the altar of St. Thomas's Church that really drains the provinces of their capital.

The greatest impetus to genealogical research comes from the Middle and Far Westerners. Their pioneer ancestors frequently lost touch with their kin on the Atlantic Seaboard. The natural interest in this subject, fanned by the growing prestige of genealogical and patriotic societies, accounts for the great run on the genealogical libraries of the East and the remarkable output of volumes on genealogy and family history in the last few years. Genealogical research becomes a passion, especially with middle-aged and elderly people. It seems to be an admirable recreation, if not taken too seriously. There are some perils. The ancestor-hunter, if he gets on the trail of wealthy forefathers, may ask himself, "What became of the demesnes and hereditaments?" and begin starting lawsuits. The half-witted quests for the Trinity Church holdings in New York, for the waterfront of St. Johns, Newfoundland, for the mythical Drake, Blake, Buchanan and other estates, have had that origin. Ancestors, on discovery, often prove disappointing. For instance, persons who have a "Van" or a "Van der" in their names often believe they are descended from titled Hollanders. These particles, however, usually mean that their Dutch ancestor was too obscure socially to have a last name. When the English took New Amsterdam, many of the Hollanders were Jans, Henriks and Willems, with no family designation. The English insisted that each man must have a second name, and the Dutch named themselves after their occupations or after the towns their families came from. Immigrants from Hoorn, Doom, Wyk and Winkle became van Hoorn, van Doom, van Wyk and van Winkle. Pieter the chimney-sweep became Pieter de Schoorsteenveger. Respectable ancestor hunters have been worried by the scarlet letter which abounds in New England records and has caused criticism of the sex life of the Puritans. According to Charles Arthur Hoppin, the Puritans did not make more than the average number of missteps, but they kept their records more sternly than other colonists. Ignorance of biology, according to Mr. Hoppin, often caused the Puritans to do injustices to first-born children; if a Puritan marriage occurred in June, an event was expected in March; if it happened in February or January, there was a scandal. The Puritans were skeptical of sevenmonths and eight-months children, and the offending parents were likely to be fined or placed under bond. The Puritan tribunals placed a broad interpretation on adultery; the leading case is that of John Underhill, convicted of adultery in Boston in 1638, on his admission that, tempted by the "temporal graces" of Mistress Wilbore, he had gazed at her in public.

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It is safer for a family, which has a vague tradition of glorious lineage, to stand on that tradition and let the records alone. Legions of Americans believe that their ancestors on the other side had coats-of-arms, castles with moats, deer forests, happy tenants and faithful retainers. This is usually an illusion. Henry Adams came to the heartless conclusion that only two New England families were entitled to bear arms—the Winthrops and the Saltonstalls. The South was peopled with cavaliers by historical novelists like Winston Churchill, but not by modern historians. Hundreds of families did display coats-of-arms in Colonial days; but, wherever there are signpainters, coats-of-arms may be had. Five years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his London agent to inquire if there was a Jefferson coat of arms; if not, he wrote, he would take one anyway.

Colonial soldiers and statesmen, signers of the Declaration of Independence and important citizens are usually considered the most desirable ancestors; but there is some eccentricity of taste on this subject. Ancestors now much sought after include pirates, parsons, witches, Indian chiefs, judges, smugglers and skippers of slave ships. William Childs, the restaurant man, in a public battle with his stockholders, tried to dazzle them with the lustre of his house by stating that two of his lineal ancestors were pirates. A great star of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society is a lady who is related on one side to the last Connecticut witch and on the other to a New York freebooter. Probably the most numerous and proudest race of descendants in the United States is the posterity of Tryn Jonas, one of the first professional midwives of the New World; she was the mother of Anneke Jans, owner, 275 years ago, of half of lower Manhattan Island, whose descendants are still hiring lawyers to sue for the property.

The faking of American family trees does not take place on any great scale to-day, according to genealogists, because the subject has been so thoroughly systematized in the last twenty years that the detection of a false pedigree is usually very simple. It is said to be nearly impossible to crash a well-established society of descendants by means of forged credentials. The social-climbing instinct and the historical sense both contribute to the present boom in genealogy.

One of the faults alleged against the Descendants, as a class, is that they do not run true to ancestral form. They claim distinction because their ancestors fought for Anglo-Saxon principles of liberty. If the fight against Prohibition is another phase of the Anglo-Saxon struggle for liberty, it must be admitted that the Descendants of Nordic stock have given a poor account of themselves. Butler, Darrow, Root, Baker and other AngloSaxon names appear on the roll of those who have talked against the Eighteenth Amendment, but the men who have done the fighting are of Latin, Celtic, Semite, Slav and Hellenic ancestry. Posterity will rear its monuments, not to Butler and Darrow, but to William V. Dwyer, "Waxy" Gordon, Manny Kessler, Madden, McCoy, Torrio and the Six Genna Brothers. The decadent Nordics drank confusion to the Volstead Act and twittered against the Anti-Soloon League, but the strong men of other races prevented the drying-up of the country. If aristocracies are based on descent from fighters in great causes, the future may see the pre-eminence of the Sons and Daughters of the Unione Siciliane, the Neapolitan Dames and the Order of Leavenworth and Atlanta.