When the United States set itself up as an
independent nation, it deliberately outlawed what were thought to be the
underpinnings of aristocracy in Europe—titles and strict settlement, which were
the means whereby estates in Europe were passed from one generation to another.
But there did develop, in the course of the late 18th century, and throughout
the 19th and 20th centuries, self-conscious elite groups on the East Coast in
Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Boston, who were interested in notions of
high social prestige and public duty across generations, in a European
aristocratic mode. Quite a lot of them married into European aristocratic
families.
Differing national economic, social and political structures preclude
comparisons between the British aristocracy of the late Victorian and Edwardian
eras, and the current holders of wealth and power in the United States.
It is not very easy to draw comparisons between the British aristocracy
in its heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the elite of the
United States, either then or now. Britain has had an aristocracy of a sort that
America has never had. It is a quite tiny country with a centralized system of
government and, indeed, of society until fairly recently. The United States is a
huge country with different elite groups dispersed across different cities.
Making comparisons of this sort is not very easy, and in some sense, not very
instructive.
It is, however, a comparison that people make, and quite a
suggestive one, that whereas in Britain the 20th and 21st centuries afforded no
great dynasties of prime ministers, America seems to have dynastic political
families, like the Bushes, the Clintons or the Gores. Dynastic political
families of this kind do not exist in Britain anymore.
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