America's Secret Aristocracy (26 page)

*
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 committee, 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.