America’s Late Ruling Class

 From Charles Coulombe:

Our first elites in the United States of America were the founders of our particular society: those who brought us political independence from Britain. Often, they had been members of the colonial elites, themselves based upon the descendants of the earliest settlers of each colony, combined with wealthier or brighter newcomers. The unique foundation of each of the Thirteen Colonies ensured that rulers and ruled alike would be quite varied ethnically and religiously.

In America’s early period, especially before the revolution, it is difficult to speak about a really “national” elite. Although a number of families did ultimately manage to found the federal regime and operate on the level of national politics, most of America’s upper class was highly localized. Elite families in New York and Pennsylvania would have different familial networks, clubs, religious affiliations, and mores.

Rather than a national elite, this period saw close collaboration between a number of localized elites, predominantly from what had been the colonial upper classes. New York City’s upper crust dates back to the Dutch era, as the Holland Society, the Society of Daughters of Holland Dames, and the St. Nicholas Society continue to bear witness to. The “Old Philadelphians,” conversely, generally descend from colonial English, Welsh, and Dutch stock, and traditionally were centered around such places as Rittenhouse Square and the string of Northwestern suburbs called “the Main Line.” The Philadelphia Club, founded in 1834, is the oldest such organization in the country with a permanent clubhouse. In Boston—the self-proclaimed “hub of the universe”—Beacon Hill and the latterly-built Back Bay became the traditional haunts of the Boston Brahmins: Cabots, Lowells, Saltonstalls, and the like. These Brahmins later came to dominate the city after the cream of local high society departed for Halifax with the British in 1776. Similarly-distinct local upper classes grew up in every major American center.

These groups shared similar educations, marital ties, and analogous positions in their respective colonies and thus a mostly-shared vision of their place in the world. Ideologically speaking, the three things that united the colonial elites were a vague generic Protestantism, a general moral consensus on fundamental social taboos and mores, and before the revolution, a shared devotion to the image of the king—their protector against Catholic France and Spain.

After the revolution, the last was replaced with a synthetic civil religion that idolized those who had accomplished the revolution and framed the constitution as heralds of “liberty.” This was the central dogma of the new national faith, which began to develop immediately following the victory over Britain. The cult of the American republic and its near-deified founders did not begin many generations after these events; in fact, those who built it often came from the same generation as the founders themselves and had lived through these events. The educational reformer Noah Webster set to work constructing a national program of schooling in American values and a new national history, in addition to writing the first-ever American English dictionary in order to enshrine a proper national linguistic idiom, distinct from the British one.

Meanwhile, the writer and literary agent Parson Weems began the work of American hagiography with glowing biographies, which became standards for American children and the source of such stories as a young, immaculately honest George Washington confessing to killing a cherry tree. Webster joined the Connecticut elite through marriage and collaborated with federalist founders like Hamilton, while the outsider Weems found his work easily appropriated into the mythos which such families shared after 1776.

The civic religion was not a cynical construction of America’s newly independent ruling elites, but a phenomenon in which they enthusiastically believed. The new elite had proved its worthiness to its own satisfaction and that of its constituents by founding and staffing the new country’s structures: government, the military, elite educational institutions, learned societies, conservation efforts, and museums and other cultural and artistic foundations. As it did so, it became increasingly national in scope and nature.

But in the northern U.S., as Henry and Charles Adams would continually mourn in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a rising class of new men was coming up through banking and nascent industry to supplement and replace the old merchant and landowning elites. These, in turn, subjugated the southern agrarian leadership via the Civil War.

Afterward, these predominantly northern “robber barons” not only grew rich, but also wished to become gentlemen. They remodeled the Ivy League and the top boarding schools into the images of Oxford, Cambridge, and the British public schools. Familiar modern traits of the Ivy League, such as the gathering of High Table dinners and neo-gothic architecture, date to this era of increased anglophilia—and to the deepening pockets of university donors, who could now fund those architectural improvements. (Read more.)

Share