Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America.

Mid-way through Lives in Trust, antrhopologist George E. Marcus explains the origin of the book's central argument. Having embarked on an ethnographic study of dynastic families in Galveston, Texas, Marcus observed what he took to be a limiting paradox in existing dynastic scholarship. Authors of dynastic sagas, he tells us, typically gather most of their facts from the periphery of the dynastic family, interviewing corps of friends, servants, and associates, tirelessly reading in family, business, and foundation archives, but rarely depending in any crucial way upon interviews with family members themselves; approaching them, indeed, in a manner that is "hedged and restrained," and learning little from them. Yet, in the narratives that result, "the families appear recentered, . . . as if the writer had been at the center of family process." So, Marcus concluded, "why not write an account of the dynasty that reflected the paths of learning about it, that reflected its decentered existence? This would at least break through the authoritative narrative in which the family story unto itself is central and privileged ..." (p. 162). This curiously postmodern concern with the relation between the process and the object of investigation is at once the strength and the weakness of Marcus's book. It is its strength because it leads to what seem to me genuine and significant discoveries about American dynasties. It is its weakness because both the epistemological-dramaturgical notion that the object of study ought to be represented in a manner reflective of the "paths of learning about it," and the specific proposition about the decentered natured of American dynasties, are themselves limiting and problematic.

Marcus's principal insight is that American dynasties, in general, rapidly evolve into complex institutions in which the descendants of the family founder play an increasingly marginal and sometimes antagonistic role vis a vis the various outsiders - lawyers, trust managers, accountants, investment advisors, corporate and foundation executives , and the like - who are brought into the dynasty to manage the family fortune. The first four chapters of the book (which, like most of the others, are previously published essays tailored slightly and ordered to present as coherent a progression as possible) articulate various patterns of dynastic decentering, analyzing in detail the emergence of non-family fiduciaries as dynastic managers; the characteristic relations of the founder's children, grandchildren, and more remote descendants to each other, to the fiduciaries, and to the dynasty as a whole; the specific role of the generation-skipping trust as the principal instrument for shaping relations within the dynasty; the usual arc of dynastic formation and dissolution (spanning about a century); and a host of other matters pertaining to the dynasty as an institution. Formal structures fade into issues of ethos and sensibility in the following five chapters, where Marcus focuses with sympathetic insight on the conflicted relation of dynastic descendants to both their fortunes and their families. Earlier, Marcus had made the interesting observation that the strongest and least ambiguous commitment to the perpetuation of the dynasty is often expressed by the non-family fiduciaries, who perceive the dynasty in terms of the fortune and its institutional embodiment in businesses, trusts, and charitable foundations. To descendants, though, the dynasty is a problem not merely of institutional management (with which they may or may not be involved) but also of self-definition. They, unlike the fiduciaries, respond to it both as a fortune and as a family - their family, which, by insisting on its collective sacredness, its particular character and style, and on the importance of its perpetuation, threatens to subdue their individual selves, a personal dilemma made more difficult by the location of the dynasty within a culture that magnifies the significance of the self. "The dynastic family," writes Marcus, "is one of the very few settings, perhaps the only one, in American society where the cultural production of the person and that of the group are equally and powerfully matched, entwined, and simultaneously in competition. It is certainly the only setting in which there is a complex effort to give a priority to the reality of collectivity over the unique, autonomous selves of its members" (p. 180). Fiduciaries are spared this agonizing competition between the dynasty and the self, and the fact that the portrait of the founder looms differently and less consequentially over lawyers and investment advisors than over children and grandchildren accounts in no small measure for - indeed, constitutes the deepest meaning of - the "decentering" of the dynasty. Marcus seems almost relieved to report that some American dynasties collapse into their empty centers, dissolving their trusts and other collective vestiges into individual (and much smaller) inheritances, thereby allowing all subsequent descendants to merge "anonymously into the middle class" (p. 43).

Marcus's ideas appear to have been shaped primarily by his fieldwork on two Galveston dynastic families, the Kempners and the Moodys, although there are chapters that probe specific issues through the rather unusual experiences of the Hunts of Dallas and the Binghams of Louisville, and, most peculiarly, the nondynastic uses of the fortune of J. Paul Getty. Having encountered few references to the hoariest and most powerful American dynasties (this is, indeed, a Texas-centered book), the reader turns with interest to a very long concluding chapter on the Rockefellers by the historian Peter Dobkin Hall. Marcus and Hall had been exchanging ideas for some time, and it is clear that both authors intended Hall's chapter to extend and enrich Marcus's argument. In many respects it does, for Hall provides an extremely effective account of the complex dynastic transitions and institutional articulations that, according to Marcus, constitute the decentering narrative of the typical American dynasty. And yet, Hall's narrative is centered on the Rockefeller family, and comes to a climax with the fourth generation's (the generation of "the Cousins") successful assertion of interest and power in dynastic affairs, their articulation of a still-greater "unity and clarity of purpose" (p. 316) than had existed even in the generation of "the Brothers," and, most interestingly, their downgrading of nonfamily experts and administrators to "a support function" (p. 315) within this apparently very healthy and decisively centered American dynasty.

I would not say that Hall's narrative invalidates the many insights that flow from Marcus's argument, but it does return our attention to the manner in which that argument was formulated. If researchers are denied productive access to self-protective members of wealthy dynastic families, does this mean that the dynasties are themselves "decentered"? Marcus, and Hall too, were stimulated to question the relation between the investigator and the object of investigation by the fact that each was a fellow of a dynastic foundation during part of the period of his dynastic research, and each claims to have become, in an unsettling way, part of the phenomenon he was trying to study. It appears to have been Marcus's questioning of this relation that led him to a carefully guarded consideration of deconstructionist theory and, through deconstruction, to the decentering hypothesis. It is interesting to follow this intellectual trail, but, quite apart from my fear that it will contribute to the regrettable fashion of authorial self-reference in scholarly books, I wish he had not been so troubled. "Decentering" is a useful idea that does not, however, adequately express the nuances of either his or Hall's discoveries, and its deconstructionist premise is at best an unnecessary distraction. Marcus and Hall have produced a very enlightening book, despite, not because of, their deep concerns about the nature of their research.