The Old American Clans

In our highly mobile and increasingly urban society, the nuclear, or conjugal, family has been the main social unit, especially among the middle classes. The extended, or consanguine, family has tended to be strongest at the very top and bottom levels of society. Throughout most of our history the extended kin group has thrived in the more remote and economically marginal areas of the nation, in the Ozarks, for instance, or in the hills of West Virginia and Tennessee. Among urban blacks, where the conjugal family has been relatively weak, the matriarchal extended family of cousins, aunts, and grandmothers has predominated. 

The extended family, or clan, also has been strong at the higher levels of American society, particularly in small towns and cities. Though most sociologists have failed to emphasize this point, the Lynds, in their study of Middle-town in Transition (1937), showed how the Ball family in the second in third generations was forming the nucleus of an upper class in Muncie, Indiana, in the 1930s. Members of consanguine families have lent a sense of continuity and stability to our increasingly bureaucratized and atomized elite structure; for example, the Mellons of Pittsburgh, the Du Ponts of Delaware, the Roosevelts and Rockefellers of New York, the Tafts of Cincinnati, the Mathers of Cleveland, the Pillsburys of Minneapolis, the Pulitzers and Busches of St. Louis, the Crockers and Hearsts of San Francisco, the Fords of Detroit, the Byrds of Virginia, and especially the Adames and Kennedys of Boston. A sense of loss pervades America today partly as a result of the Kennedy assassinations, testifying to the public’s longing for continuity at the top.

Elite individuals may come from a wide variety of ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, but an upper-class, as we have seen, is more or less endogamous subculture. This subculture, referred to as “Society” up until the Second World War at least, had many characteristics of a gemeinschaft, or tribal society. No wonder Henry Adams felt at home among the natives of Samoa: “They are tremendous aristocrats,” he once wrote. “Family is everything.” The core of Society, as Adams knew, is a group of extended families whose members have intermarried for several generations. Though there is a national upper-class subculture in America, especially since the rise of nationally patronized boarding-schools and universities in the last decades of the nineteenth century, each major city had its own upper-class folk ways and mores, similar in form if varying in content. Both Boston and Philadelphia, for instance, have upper classes whose members speak with accents that distinguish them from the rest of their city’s population; at the same time, the spoken r, which is dropped in Boston and emphasized in Philadelphia, is a mark of regional influence. 

Of all the upper classes in major American cities, those in Boston and Philadelphia are probably the most alike. A central core of extended families—the Adamses, Lowells, and Cabots in Boston and the Biddles, Cadwaladers, and Ingersolls in Philadelphia, for example—is surrounded by several hundred other prominent families. These family circles are, in turn, enlarged and given form by a host of upper-class voluntary associations that foster a distinctive style of life. The Somersets and Tavern clubs in Boston are matched by the Philadelphia and Franklin Inn clubs in Philadelphia. For the ladies there is the Chilton in Boston and the Acorn in Philadelphia. Both cities have their private libraries, like the Athenaeum in Boston and the Athenaeum and Library Company in Philadelphia; there are historical and genealogical societies, as well as ancestor worshipping organizations like the Colonial Dames (not DAR) and the Sons of the Revolution. Although the Boston Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra serve the whole community of music lovers, fashionable women in both cities ritually attend the concerts on Friday afternoons. In both cities there are private day schools, in the city during the nineteenth century and in the suburbs today, where upper-class youths are both educated and introduced to a well-defined system of manners and values; their manners are further refined at weekly dancing classes. Until after the Second World War, most daughters did not go off to college, and the debutante ritual was an important rite of passage in which proper young ladies were introduced to the proper adult world as well as to their eligible peers. All of these socialization processes have fostered a pattern of strict class endogamy, as indicated by such names as Cabot Lodge, Godfrey Cabot Lowell, Peabody Gardner, and A. Lawrence Lowell in Boston, and Cadwalader Biddle, Cadwalader Morris, Wistar Morris, and George Wharton Pepper in Philadelphia. No wonder a recent social critic defined an upper-class WASP as someone whose first name is a last name. 

-excerpted from “Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia” by E. Digby Baltzell (1979)