August 14, 2006
Class Acts and U.S. Politics II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:25 AM EST Just a few addenda to the posts of Fredric Smoler and Alexander Burns.
This country has never had a self-perpetuating upper class such as ruled Britain for centuries. Such families as Cavendish (dukes of Devonshire), Stanley (earls of Derby), Howard (dukes of Norfolk), Cecil (marquesses of Salisbury), and Churchill (dukes of Marlborough) have been rich and politically potent for hundreds of years.
But of the American families who were legendarily rich in the gilded age, a mere hundred years ago, with names such as Gould, Vanderbilt, Astor, Armour, Phipps, and Morgan, only the Rockefellers are on the Forbes 400 List today. Indeed, of those 400 only about 80 came from very rich families. The rest made it themselves. And while great piles of money are a very handy commodity in politics, especially with personal contributions other than one’s own greatly restricted, only with the Kennedys has it led to the White House. The Roosevelts and the Bushes were “well born” (to use a term that went out with my grandmother Steele), but they were only comfortably rich.
This has always been a country of the nouveau riche, as new fortunes eclipse old ones and old ones get dispersed among heirs. So money gentles your condition in a hurry. As that consummate social snob Ward McAllister explained about the first 400 (a term he coined), “Our catalogue [of the 400] has been prepared with much care, the names having been well sifted and weighed, and only those admitted who are now prominently to the front, who have the means to maintain their position, either by gold, brains or beauty, gold being always the most potent ‘open sesame,’ beauty the next in importance, while brains and ancestors count for very little.”
So it seems to me that genuineness counts for a lot, at least in modern times, when the media will dig out the details regardless. One of the very first pieces of American political ephemera, a handkerchief from the 1840 campaign of William Henry Harrison, showed a picture of his humble birthplace, a log cabin with smoke curling out of the chimney. Of course Harrison, in fact, was born at Berkeley, one of Virginia’s greatest colonial plantation houses, and his father was a governor of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Some log cabin: The lawn was large enough for the Army of the Potomac to camp on it during the Civil War.
You could never get away with a stunt like that today, so you might as well just be who and what you are. I remember the professor who taught me History of the English Language complaining that FDR’s accent, known to linguists as “Park Avenue Oxford,” was widely imitated, greatly complicating the delineation of American accent patterns. FDR just spoke the way he spoke. Had he been the son of a Hyde Park groundskeeper he’d have been laughed at, not imitated.
George H. W. Bush, to be sure, lacks the common touch (which his son does not) and all too often tried to pretend that he had it. That was his mistake. One can see John Kennedy confronted with something like a bar code scanner and laughing off his unfamiliarity with this everyday technology with a witty remark.
But I disagree with Fred Smoler on the broccoli remark. I think it was Bush senior’s finest unscripted moment. Instead of worrying about the reaction of the United Broccoli Farmers of America lobby, he simply said (as I remember it), “I hate broccoli. When I was young my mother made me eat it. Now I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat broccoli!”
Millions of Americans, remembering their own childhood traumas with a plate of some loathed but good-for-you food, and dessert out of reach until they ate it (or managed to sneak it to the dog so he could eat it), heard the President and thought, “Right on, man!”
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