Many pretend to decry the idea of inherited favo ur but political dynasties are as American as mudslinging and pork, writes William Boothin LA.
The American people, having won in violent revolution their freedom from the tyranny of kings, quickly surrendered to the idea that certain families are destined to lead - as long as we get to pick them.
Bush. Clinton. Bush. Clinton? While it would be extraordinary in our history for two families to occupy the Oval Office consecutively for decades, political dynasties are as American as mudslinging and pork.
Most precocious children can probably recite a few of the most assertive brand names in American history: the brilliant but cranky Adams family; the Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin; the tragic and cinematic Kennedys. But these well-known repeats only begin to tell the tale of politicians advantaged by their kin.
While we in the age of American Idol may pretend to decry the idea of inherited favour, there are reasons why Hamilton Fish II, Hamilton Fish III and Hamilton Fish IV all served in Congress - and one reason is Hamilton Fish I, who served as US representative, New York governor and US senator. (The Fishes were in Congress, off and on, from 1845 to 1995, or put another way, from the invention of the rubber band to the founding of Yahoo.)
Political genes? You might think so looking at those persistent Frelinghuysens of New Jersey, who have put six Frelinghuysens in Congress (four senators, two representatives), including the current Rep Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-NJ. That is staying power.
So with the prospect of another family dynasty in the making - not only is Hillary Clinton the wife of a former president, Mitt Romney is the son of a former Michigan governor and presidential candidate - we telephoned a few sage historians to ask: What gives?
A full 45 per cent of the members of the first Congress in 1789 had a relative who was also serving, according to Pedro Dal Bo, professor of economics at Brown University and co-author of a study on congressional dynasties.
"The number of members with relatives is too high to explain away by the relatively smaller population of the United States at the time," Dal Bo says. Two hundred years later, 10 per cent of Congress has a close relative who has also served in the House or Senate.
The evidence is all around: the Gores, the Murkowskis, the Rockefellers, the Bakers, the Doles, the Bonos, the Meekses, the Dodds, the Tsongases, the Chafees. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is the daughter of former Rep Thomas D'Alesandro jnr. "Some families are very good at politics. Perhaps it is a family trait," Dal Bo says. "Being in power makes it more likely you will have descendants in power. Being in Congress facilitates your relatives' entrance to Congress. Power begets power."
Stephen Hess, a historian at the Brookings Institution, is the author of the 1966 book America's Political Dynasties, which notes that there have been 700 families with two or more members of Congress, and they account for 1,700 of the 10,000 men and women who have served in the House and Senate.
"Initially it was a question of who is best prepared to serve," Hess says. "Then over time it becomes a question of branding." The nation's first leaders were chosen from "the crème de la crème of the country", says Hess, as long as la crème were white Christian males with property.
Another way to look at the predominance of the relative few is the "small pool" theory. "You have this narrow set of aristocratic families - the draw was minuscule - this narrow set of educated people who had the time and leisure to engage in politics in a young country where most people were just trying to feed themselves," says historian Edward Renehan, author of The Lion's Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War. "Some colonies before the revolution did have a ruling elite," says Jack Rakove, Stanford University historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution.
But there was also an instinct to counterbalance the weight of ancestry. "The founders were united in their attitude that political office should not be transmitted from one family or passed down through the generations," Rakove says.
David Kennedy, Stanford historian and co-author of popular high school textbook The American Pageant, notes that the founders "were not wild believers in all-out democracy . . . They rejected the monarch. But they also believed in the rule of the best men. The electoral college is a vestige of that, and so is the Senate."
Kennedy (no relation to those Kennedys) says the founders "expected that 'nature's aristocrats' or 'the first families of Virginia', as they would be called, would take up their proper roles." Among the first and most prominent political families were the Adamses, though David McCullough, author of John Adams, bristles at applying the word "dynasty" to them.
They aren't a dynasty "in the real meaning of the word", he says. Though John Adams' son, John Quincy Adams, became the sixth president (and his son Charles Francis Adams was a member of Congress and ambassador to Britain), McCullough feels the word implies a certain unseemliness. "The children and grandchildren of the Adams family were raised with the idea that public service was expected of you. John Adams, he never ignored the call to duty. To his financial detriment, with a threat of his life, to his marriage." McCullough asks: "Is that a worthy tradition in a family? To raise their children to serve. It was not held as a handicap or something to be suspicious of."
But would the nation have been better served had son not followed father in the White House? McCullough thinks not. "John Quincy Adams was a very great man," McCullough says. "He wasn't an important president. He wasn't the greatest president. But he wasn't a bad president." By the time John Quincy Adams became the sixth president in 1825, the idea that great families owed a great debt had gone out of fashion a bit, confronted by the rise of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and the more inclusive "Jacksonian democracy", which legitimises people from humble origins, Kennedy says.
"You can have the backwoods bastard hick, from the fabled log cabin," says Kennedy. "In fact, the log cabin becomes a proxy for humble origins." He points out that today a candidate of meagre birth is likely to trumpet the fact.
"You can be a Roosevelt," Kennedy says, a scion of wealth, an heir to a great name, "but you have to be a tribune of the people." The Roosevelts are a most American dynasty, as Theodore Roosevelt (progressive Republican, man of action) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (progressive Democrat, suffered from polio, steeled the nation in depression and war) were at once so different yet so similar. Theodore served in the state legislature, was governor of New York, assistant secretary of the navy and president - and Franklin pursued the exact same path to the White House.
Many of the founding families played their roles and then departed the stage. "If you look at history through a long enough lens, what happens is that they either lose interest in us, or we lose interest in them, and they fade away," Hess says.
"They've done well by us and we've done well by these people." - ( LA Times-Washington Post)