Old Money.

Old Money.

There are enough insights and revealing anecdotes in this book to keep the reader going despite the meandering, often fuzzy tone. The book is essentially an attack on the Ernest Hemingway heresy--the idea that the rich are different only because they have more money. In fact, Aldrich says, America's old rich are different in being repositories of certain values that can't survive elsewhere because they're incovenient for non-aristocratic people who are worried about getting ahead. Aldrich presents the Old Money values as being, on balance, quite admirable. They include loyalty, service, and modesty, with the downside being raw anti-Semitism and other ugly traits.

Aldrich is persuasive in at least the first part of this argument: showing that Old Money families think of themselves as different. They consciously center their lives on family ties (although he doesn't make the parallel, they sound about as family-conscious as Italian immigrants). They revere their club lives and, above all, their prep schools. They are supercilious toward, but secretly afraid of, ambitious striving people, especially the Jewish ones. Until the Vietnam war, they were more obsessed than most middle-class Americans with the romance of a combat record. They knew that wartime service could redeem people who otherwise would come across as pantywaists--think of George Bush.

What's less persuasive is Aldrich's wistful assumption that this old class has lost its allure. In a country of self-made men, Aldrich says, no one can really respect the courtly old ways. Maybe the patrician values have faded; loyalty, service, and modesty seem on the defensive at all levels of American life. But Old Money status, the appearance of being upper class, seems much more important now than it was a generation ago. American society is still more entrepreneurial than any other, but the allure of Old Money snobbery is so strong that people often try to conceal the fact that they've risen on their own. Eliot Richardson is an orphan, a little-known fact that makes his accomplishments all the more admirable; yet for some reason he presents himself as a 20th-generation prep-school man. From Peter Peterson on the respectable side to Ivan Boesky and Martin Siegel on the disreputable, people who've piled up money on Wall Street have used it to buy European art, English clothes, old Long Island houses, and other fixtures designed to make them seem born to privilege. The infamous Newsweek ads showing George Will sipping tea in his study are powerful proof that old-money snobbery is far from dead. H. Ross Perot is a self-made man who never pretended to be anything else, but many of America's recently rich act as if they're ashamed of having succeeded on their own.

This is a perverse form of vanity--why should Americans pretend that they had inherited their position rather than having earned it? It's also more destructive to American values than it would be in most other societies. The faith that people can change their lives is the trait that makes American society most different from all others. The idea that only Old Money is good tells people that they can't change--the only way to get the right accent, the right childhood friends, and the right prep-school background is to inherit them.

There is also a hey-wait-a-minute factor to this book. Aldrich says he has spent much of his life reflecting on the psychological effects of having been born to an Old-Money family. But for most families other than the Adamses of Massachusetts, the whole concept of an American aristocracy is peculiar. What heritage, in fact, was Aldrich born to? Less than 100 years ago, his great-grandfather was a Rhode Island politician who decided to sell out. He worked his way into the U.S. Senate and then did favors for several special interests. He left office a rich man. That, and that alone, is the basis of all the rumination about the burdens of upperclassness. Suppose Ed Meese leaves office with a lot of dough, or Vance Hartke, or Paul Laxalt. Is this going to leave us with future Meeses and Hartkes and Laxalts agonizing about the meaning of old wealth?