America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Moving even farther south, to St. Augustine, Florida, one encounters another puzzle and anomaly. St. Augustine is the oldest city in the United States—founded in 1565, half a century before Jamestown or Plymouth and more than a hundred years before New York. And yet no hereditary society of the First Families of St. Augustine, or even the First Families of Florida, exists. If any descendants of the founding families of St. Augustine exist, they have all moved elsewhere, pulled up their roots, and forgotten where those roots were.

  *Not composed of descendants of Minnesota pioneers but of colonists who settled the Colony of New Sweden on the Delaware River in 1638, in what is now the state of Pennsylvania.

  *Of course Adams had a genealogical axe to grind as the chronicler of the Mayflower-descended Adams family of Massachusetts.

  16

  Beer and the Bourgeoisie

  Naturally enough, the majority of the oldest of America’s aristocratic families have their roots in our oldest cities, the seaports of the East Coast. This is not to say that the newer cities of the Midwest—opened up to trade and commerce by the nineteenth-century expansion of the railroads—do not have their Old Guard, or “first cabin” families, but just that they are not as long established. Two of the great “founding families” of Chicago, for example, the Fields and the McCormicks, were relative Johnny-come-latelies to the business of dynasty creating. Cyrus McCormick, with his reaper patent, did not arrive in Chicago until 1847, when the future Windy City was described as an insignificant lakeport. Marshall Field—though from a family that can trace its descent from Zachariah Field, who arrived in Dorchester, Massachusetts, about 1629—was a poor farmer’s son when he arrived in Chicago in the 1850s and did not acquire the famous store that bears his name until 1867.

  Cincinnati has its still wealthy and prominent Tafts, and Cleveland has its Mathers and Cases and Boltons. But in these cities, as elsewhere, the first-cabin families have been somewhat eclipsed by newer wealth: railroad money, Civil War money, and money that is even newer than that. Just as in Boston the Hancocks and Otises and Quincys have been overshadowed by the later-arriving Cabots and Lowells, and in Philadelphia the Ingersolls, Willings, and Chews have been outflanked by Biddies, Cadwaladers, Pews, and Campbell’s Soup Dorrances, the old families of Detroit—Newberrys, Algers, and Joys, who used to boast that “a Ford could go anywhere except into society”—now feel quite overwhelmed, fiscally and socially, by the “internal combustion money” of the Fords and Dodges and Chryslers, as well as by “people nobody had even heard of ten years ago,” such as Lee Iacocca. To the old families of the East Coast—to Livingstons, Jays, Schieffelins, and the like—anything west of the Allegheny Mountains tends to be dismissed as “new money.” There were, after all, no Declaration of Independence signers from west of Pennsylvania. And so the corollary is that the Middle West lacks traditions and therefore breeding.

  In St. Louis, on the other hand, one of the oldest Midwest cities, the situation is a little different. The city is justly famous for its publishing Pulitzers, its shoemaking Florsheims, its retailing Stixes, and its beer-brewing Busches and their Anheuser and Orthwein cousins. The Florsheims and Stixes have never made a secret of the fact that they are Jewish and arrived in America in the mid-nineteenth century with the first wave of German-Jewish immigration. The Pulitzers, on the other hand, have a problem in St. Louis, since it has long been rumored that the Pulitzers were “originally Jewish” but have preferred to conceal this fact. All that is known is that the family is “of Magyar descent,” from Hungary, and that the first Joseph Pulitzer used to stress the point that his mother, at least, was a Roman Catholic. For some reason, the same rumor has also circulated about the Busch family, though there is absolutely no evidence to support it. But it has something to do with the fact that, a number of years ago, August A. Busch, Jr., “had to build his own country club” because, presumably, the St. Louis Country Club didn’t want him. And a certain amount of local jealousy can’t be ruled out—since the Busches have made a great deal of money from a very plebeian commodity and live like medieval Bavarian barons on their estate at Grant’s Farm, where they are enthusiastic dispensers, as well as promoters, of their product.

  But from the prominence of German and Central European names in St. Louis today, it should not be assumed that St. Louis’s real roots are German as, say, they are a few hundred miles to the east in Cincinnati. St. Louis’s true roots and real aristocracy are French, dating back to 1764, when the settlement was named after Louis XV. Descendants of the French pioneer families today will point out that the street prosaically named Main Street was originally the Rue Royale. Walnut Street was the Rue Bonhomme, Market Street was the Rue de la Tour, Second Street was the Rue de l’Église, Third Street was the Rue de Granges, and so on.

  As might be expected, the first colonists in St. Louis came up the Mississippi River from New Orleans. There, in 1763, Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent and Pierre Laclède Liguest, New Orleans merchants, obtained from the French director-general of Louisiana the exclusive right to trade with the Missouri River Indians and with those west of the Mississippi above the Missouri. The following year, a party headed by Auguste Chouteau headed upriver to the selected site of their trading post near the juncture of the two rivers. The post was immediately successful, and packets of fur, wheat, and flour traded from the Indians were floated downriver to the New Orleans market. Hearing of the success of the St. Louis colony, French from the Illinois territory, unwilling to live under British rule, came downriver to St. Louis, and within a year some thirty French families were prosperously established there.

  In 1765, when the British military took possession of the Illinois country east of the Mississippi, the French commander, Louis St. Ange de Bellerive, withdrew with his troops to St. Louis and assumed military command of the colony. Officially, the territory belonged to Spain, but Spain had not exercised her authority over it and permitted St. Ange de Bellerive to act in Madrid’s behalf until 1770, when the first Spanish lieutenant governor took over. Thus, with the exception of a Spanish official and a handful of Spanish soldiers, the entire population of St. Louis was French and Roman Catholic. The French families proliferated and intermarried with one another to such an extent that, by the time the territory was transferred to the United States, it was estimated that two-thirds of the population of the city was in some way related to each other.

  The great French families of St. Louis today include the Peugnets, Cabannes (some use an accent as Cabannés), Gareschés, and Chouteaus, and it was the two original Chouteau brothers, Auguste and Pierre, who made the biggest fortune, having worked out a monopoly to trade in furs with the Osage tribe. But the Gareschés and Desloges and Cabannes, to whom the Choteaus are marvelously interrelated, did not do badly, and all the old French families have patriotically persisted to this day in giving their children French first names: Eugénie, Pierre, René, Marie, and so on. Today’s Auguste Chouteau represents the eighth generation in a direct line from the first Auguste Chouteau, who headed the first settlement party. Today’s Desloges—whose family motto is only half-jokingly said to be Après moi le Desloge—own the St. Joseph Lead Company and a house with an underground ballroom filled with statues of other saints.

  Since for years the principal marketplace for everything St. Louis produced was New Orleans, it was natural that the city should have adapted some of New Orleans’s social customs. Here, St. Louis’s restrained answer to Mardi Gras is the annual Veiled Prophet’s Ball, held every October since 1878, and restrained because St. Louis has tried to avoid the atmosphere of carnival hoopla and tourist appeal that has come to characterize Mardi Gras, though there is a public parade. Here the identity of the annual Veiled Prophet Queen is revealed for the first time to her “subjects.” The identity of the Veiled Prophet himself—he is indeed heavily veiled—is supposedly never revealed. But, since most people are not very good about keeping secrets, and since both the queen and the prophet are selected by a commi
ttee, the queen’s identity is seldom a complete surprise, and the name of the gentleman behind the veils usually leaks out sooner or later. The ball itself, held the night before the parade, is a more exclusive, by-invitation-only affair where the enthroned prophet holds his Court of Love and Beauty, the season’s selection of debutantes. The Veiled Prophet Ball committee tries to select its queen with as much care as Miss America judges, with points given for looks, talent, and poise, as well as for family background. The Veiled Prophet Queen is then required to promise that she will not become engaged or marry for a full year afterward, or until her debutante career is over. Several years ago, however, the queen was discovered to be not only married but four months pregnant.

  The French have traditionally never gotten along well with either the British or the Germans, and so, while families like the Chouteaus and Desloges have frequently married each other, they have rarely married Anheusers or Busches or Orthweins, or any of the descendants of the German immigrants—Jewish and non-Jewish—who began arriving in St. Louis in the mid-nineteenth century. At the same time, the old French families of St. Louis, though intensely proud of their heritage, have never lived in the cocoon of aristocratic self-assurance that has characterized some of the old eastern families. They have shown little tolerance for nonconformity, unconventionality, or eccentricity, and it is hard to say what St. Louis society would have made of as bizarre a creature as Gordon Langley Hall. Families such as the Chouteaus and the Desloges came to St. Louis as traders, and they have remained such: conventional businessmen and their families leading conventional lives. Desloges toil for such familiar causes as the Heart Fund, and serve as trustees and directors of the Missouri Historical Society, and try not to get their names in the paper for any untoward reasons. Living more as members of a haute bourgeoisie than as aristocrats, they have placed much emphasis on politesse and comme il faut. They might be said to form the historic backbone of the Social Register and such proper institutions as the sedate St. Louis Country Club—which, once upon a time, supposedly did not want August A. Busch, Jr., as a member.

  And so, as they say here, “Gussie Busch built his own country club.” But it wasn’t exactly a country club. What he founded, and built, was the Bridlespur Hunt Club, devoted to horse shows, four-in-hand racing, and fox hunting. To be sure, it bore a certain resemblance to a traditional country club. Situated on twelve rolling acres in what is now a development called Huntleigh Village, its clubhouse called to mind a Virginia manor house, to which Mr. Busch added stables, kennels, a race course, a show ring, and a swimming pool. Busch and his fellow charter members, several of them his relatives, considered adding a golf course but decided against it. It was not horsey enough. Bridlespur held its first annual horse show in 1928, about which the St. Louis Post-Dispatch commented somewhat waspishly, “The competitors were the club’s charter members, and the spectators ranged from those noted in the Social Register to those lucky to be listed in the telephone book.” But, insists Mr. Busch, “what we all had in common was horses. We all loved horses and hounds and hunting, and we all had a helluva good time.”

  The upper classes, in America as well as England, have long had a passion for animals—horses and dogs in particular, as England’s queen herself continues to demonstrate. And it was in the 1920s that many newly rich Americans started to take up horsey sports as a possible passport to instant aristocracy and instant old money.

  Actually, as upper-crust—or at least expensive—sports go, fox hunting isn’t very old. And not only is it a relative newcomer to the panoply of rich men’s pastimes, but it was also not even introduced by the upper classes. Nor was it originally thought of as a sport. Fox hunting dates only to the seventeenth century, when England was becoming overrun with foxes that were attacking flocks of chickens, geese, and other domestic fowl. The first fox hunts were organized by poor farmers, and out of sheer necessity, in an attempt to bring the marauding fox population under control. Even today, in the sheep-farming country of western Britain, the fox is a serious threat during the lambing season, and hunting the fox is a grim business, not undertaken for the fun of it at all. All the modern trappings of the fox hunt—the rigid dress code, which changes seasonally, the arcane vocabulary, the elaborate rules—represent even later developments.

  In fact, some sports purists claim that fox hunting is not properly a sport at all, since there are no winners and no losers—not even the fox, which, in American hunts, is always spared. It is, they argue, merely an equine fashion show at which the hunters display their custom-made pink coats, their skin-fitting white breeches, and their three-thousand-dollar British-made boots; a pastime for social climbers. Games with a more aristocratic tradition are golf, tennis, and polo, which can be played on horseback or on bicycles, or even croquet or roque, a game so aristocratic that, in the seventeenth century, only members of the French royal family were permitted to play it. The origins of golf, meanwhile, are lost in the mists of prehistory, though a version of it was played by the ruling class in Roman times, and the Romans are credited with having introduced golf to England and Scotland. (The east window of Gloucester Cathedral, dating from the mid-fourteenth century, depicts a figure wielding a club who looks very much like a golfer, though why a golfer should appear in an ecclesiastical setting is a mystery.) Tennis is an equally ancient game and may have originated in either Egypt or Persia as early as 500 B.C. And polo is probably just as old, with its origins in pre-Christian Asia, though it was not taken up by the English-speaking world until its discovery in India in the middle of the nineteenth century by the British Raj, which formed the Calcutta Polo Club in 1860.

  And so, with the creation of the Bridlespur Hunt, the battle lines were drawn between the members of the St. Louis Country Club, who preferred their traditional and genteel golf and tennis, and Mr. Busch’s flashy new endeavor. Each group looked sniffily down its collective nose at the other. It was not that Mr. Busch was interfering with anybody. When his fox hunters incorporated the Huntleigh area in 1928, it enjoyed the distinction of having the most horses and the fewest people of any municipality in St. Louis County. Its 680 acres were inhabited by 53 horses, 24 foxhounds, and only 17 people. But it was Mr. August Anheuser Busch, Jr.’s, style—or some would say lack of it—that rubbed Old Guard St. Louis the wrong way.

  For one thing, as far as the French families were concerned, here was the German-descended Mr. Busch trying to act like an Englishman. For another, there was the sheer, almost vulgar, vastness of Mr. Busch’s wealth. His fortune has been estimated to be as much as $300 million, though he has periodically pooh-poohed that figure as being $200 million too high. August Busch has gone to none of the right schools. In fact, he has had very little formal education at all, which, he cheerfully admits, is because none of the right schools or even the wrong ones would take him. “Without a doubt,” he says, “I was the world’s lousiest student,” though the University of St. Louis finally awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Laws degree in 1969. Then there have been his well-publicized marital adventures. He has been married four times—widowed once, divorced twice—and his third wife, whom he married when he was fifty-three, was the daughter of a Swiss restaurant manager and was only twenty-five. For this and other reasons the Busches have never been given the nod by the Social Register.

  Meanwhile, August Busch enjoys living in a truly imperial style. His estate at Grant’s Farm, a 281-acre tract encompassing the farm and log cabin where Ulysses S. Grant was raised, includes a thirty-four-room French Renaissance château, air-conditioned stables where he keeps his prize collection of Clydesdale horses, barns to contain a million-dollar collection of antique carriages, and a private zoo with chimpanzees (which are often dressed up in costumes), deer, buffalo, longhorn steer, and other animals that are allowed to roam freely in their natural habitat, as well as an elephant named Tessie. Not the least bit modest about his immodest surroundings, August Busch opens Grant’s Farm to the public on a daily basis, and visitors can tou
r the place on miniature trains, all free of charge.

  Busch’s flair for self-promotion—and the promotion of his beer—has been prodigious, and he is famous for the huge parties he has tossed at the farm for wholesalers, retailers, and even saloon-keepers, who are exhorted to keep pushing his beers across their counters to customers. He is a man who clearly loves to be in the spotlight and to see his name in public places. Though he may regard himself as an aristocrat, he is hardly a secret one. When he bought the St. Louis Cardinals in 1953, the old Sportsman’s Park was promptly renamed Busch Stadium. He claims to hate the nickname Gussie, but the newspapers persist in calling him that, which gives him a chance to deliver broadsides at the press, which get his name in the papers all over again. He is also famous for his hot temper, for loving to raise particular hell if things don’t go his way at the brewery, and for his barnyard humor.

  There was, for example, a scene at Bridlespur a number of years ago that Busch still roars over. “I remember once,” he says, “the hounds found a fox over at Grey’s farm, and they ran for an hour without check. One by one, the quitters dropped out, and finally there was no one left but Julius Van Ralde and myself. Van Ralde’s horse hit the top rail of a fence and went down, and Van Ralde landed face first in a cow pie. He sat up and put his hand to his cheek and yelled, ‘I’m bleeding!’ I could see the son-of-a-bitch wasn’t hurt. So I tossed him my handkerchief and left him to figure out the problem for himself!” Then there have been innovations at Bridlespur that would make members of older and more sedate hunt clubs in Virginia and Maryland blanch with horror. At Bridlespur’s annual horse show, Busch introduced a “costume class” competition, and one year it was won by Andrew W. Johnson, the head of the International Shoe Company, who came as Lady Godiva, wearing a wig and a sheer flesh-colored body stocking, with his toenails and fingernails painted red, riding bareback on a white horse. August Busch roars at that one, too.