The American blat

  

Ferdinand Lundberg, in 1939, wrote a book about the sixty wealthiest families in America. He made the audacious claim that these families collectively owned and directed most of America’s wealth – her industrial capacity, her speculative/financial sector, her raw materials. He names the families and engages in the tedious geneological work of showing how marriage and strategic alliances maintain and expand fortunes that have their roots, many of them, in the 19^th century. He goes there from the first sentence in the book, which proclaims: “The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth.” He claims that behind the de jure democratic form of government is a de facto government, “absolutist and plutocratic.”

 Now, it is a difficult business, tracking family fortunes. For one thing, “family” is a misleading category. Lundberg’s families are really more like the famous modern Russian clans, blat. Numbers of families and associates are held together in a web of mutual interests, which one can generally call after the family name of those who founded it. Thus, to use Lundberg’s first family, the Rockefellers, we can see that a Carnegie marrying a Rockefeller (a scion of one of the branches), which occurred when J. Stillman Rockefeller married Nancy C. S. Carnegie, grandniece of Andrew. Lundberg, incidentally, is a deadeye for those middle names. Where does “Stillman” come from? It comes from James Stillman, whose daughter married a Rockefeller. Stillman was the founder of National City Bank, now known as Citibank.

 Corporations as fronts for blat are an understudied subject of capitalist culture in America. Scratch the self-made description in Forbes, and you will find some blat money flowing. Famously, General Motors began on Du Pont money. An actual Du Pont was the CEO of GM in the 1920s, but a company doesn’t have to have such a direct connection to be, well, connected. The Ames family fortune helped found General Electric. Apple Corporation was shepherded through its early years by the Nautilus Fund, connected to Eaton Vance, one of the first mutual funds in the U.S., based in Boston. You can find the branches of a number of Brahmin families in looking through the Eatons and the Vances. Their life stories are all edited in the newspapers after the sixties, when it was no longer cool to show, so evidently, the source of the money that sent one to prep school and then to Princeton.

If Lundberg is right, then American historians have truly missed the boat. It would be like historians of 15^th century France ignoring the nobility and misunderstood the form of French government. In other words, historians have treated the United States as though it were permanently the country Tocqueville described, but it is really, since Tocqueville’s time, the country of magnates and their sons and daughters that Henry James wrote about.