The aristocratic architects of the American Revolution firmly rejected any possibility of a hereditary chief executive. Washington, the greatest aristocrat of his country and its richest man as well as the leader of the egalitarian revolution, angrily rejected the suggestion he be a king. John Adams grew furious when people suggested he wanted his son to succeed him as president, and when it happened, anomolously Adams reached the top not through his father's by-then extinct Federalist Party but as a loyal subordinate in the party of his father's opponent, Jefferson.
But in these egalitarian times when TV offers any Joe or Jane the chance to be a millionaire, network sportscaster, "survivor" or even spouse of a star just by winning a contest, the presidency really has become hereditary.
Reporters scramble for syntax to make clear who they mean when they talk of "President George Bush," a challenge the syntax-challenged pair who share that title and name luckily do not have to meet. But Democrats cannot self-righteously call this a phenomenon unique to those ivy-covered Republicans.
The House of Kennedy is chief sponsor of JFK the Second, John Kerry -- war hero and progressive Senator from Massachusetts.
And if he doesn't make it to the Presidency this year, his bloodline and familial relationship to Kennedy not quite direct enough, waiting in the wings are those starry-eyed over bringing the House of Clinton back to the Throne.
In 2000, even the temporary stop-gap candidate holding down the fort till Madame President-To-Be could prepare herself was Albert Gore Jr., the scion of a frustrated president-to-be from the Fifties.
Why this sudden fascination with right of succession? Why at a time when the English have banished the long-dominant hereditary principle from their political leadership, transformed even the House of Lords into an elective body, and even dared to half-think out loud of abolishing the monarchy in some far-off day, have the people across the ocean who rebelled against their hereditary lords suddenly become infatuated with hereditary rule themselves?
(Let's not even go into the number of senators, representatives and governors who bear famous names.)
The answer is rooted in human nature, just as the revolution was. People naturally seek steady continuous growth in their lives. They became frustrated when the plant, as it were, is tightly wedged in by obstacles which keep it from growing. They become even more perturbed when the plant is plucked up by the roots, its continuity definitively interrupted, further growth impossible, the plant dead. The American Revolution came because the anachronistic feudal practices of the colonial rulers and the anachronistic limits of being treated as weak colonies lacking self-sufficiency hedged the growth of a dynamic society. Now, the situation is the opposite. Continuity is gone. People look for something to give them the illusion, the pretense of continuity, just to help them feel it's the same earth beneath their feet and the same sun crossing the heavens.
I became aware how true this is yesterday reading a novel written when I was a child, meaning seemingly centuries ago, Robert Traver's ANATOMY OF A MURDER, set in my own state not far from where I live. It had might as well be set in a different world. Not only does the lawyer-narrator set his own hours and go fishing when he feels like it, but there is a deeper difference. This difference is at the core of why the presidency has become hereditary.
The judge in the trial, Traver says, he could just imagine as a kid at the swimming hole of the "rich agricultural community where he now presides as judge." Forget that "rich agricultural community" now sounds like an oxymoron, or that "community" itself is a word that sends some scrambling for dictionaries.
What is most anachronistic about this sentence is the idea of a boy from the local swimming hole becoming the judge. It isn't just the idea of being a local guy and not a transplant in this mobile society, but something much deeper, something much more erosive of our sense of continuity as a society. Reading between the lines of Traver's prose, you sense that perhaps the judge's father was judge before him when he swam at the swimming hole or, if not judge, certainly a prominent member of the local gentry.
Because this is what America was like, as recently as when I was a child - and I am still a fairly young man. We lived in little towns or in big cities that had the character of little towns where people knew you because they had known your parents and grandparents before you and where leadership, if not quite inherited, was assumed from generation to generation. "I used to go drinking with your grandfather!" old men would tell me with a gleam in their eyes, and older women, with a slightly different gleam, would say, "OH - you're CHARLEY's boy." The richest man in town was the son of the man who'd been the richest man in town a century before. The political process was made to appear egalitarian, self-made laundry owners and car distributors sharing office with bankers and lawyers, but always there was the not quite invisible shadowy presence of an establishment. And when it came time to go to college, the establishment became still more evident, as doors opened or did not open because of where you came from.
This may not have been an ideal state of affairs, but it made for the comfort that comes from familiarity. You knew who you were dealing with because you had dealt with them before, or their parents. And until you reached the age where that was true, people knew who you were, for the same reason. One meshed with familiar patterns, choosing local leaders because of their school and church and, yes, family affiliations, and life went on as it always had. Or seemed to.
That is no more. The local gentry, if there are any still, have probably moved away to a big city, or perhaps declared bankruptcy as the local department store and feed grain dealership have gone under with competition from chain stores and Cargill. Everything has become a restless faceless race for status. People are bewildered, confused. No one tells my sons they drank with my father or dated me, because anyone of whom that is true lives 800 miles away. And the mayor, like as not, is a guy who grew up in a big city even further away, who came here ten years ago to take a middle-management position in a local factory owned by a multinational corporation. And of course, the mayor himself may not serve out his term, because he may be moved to a new position - or the factory may be moved to Mexico.
So what do people do, familiarity gone? Well, if they can't find the signs and badges of continuity around them, they seek them far away, in the media. Hollywood and rock stars, and even sports stars, tend to be
children of people who bore that status before them. If we don't know the Little League coach, we feel we know the National League home run king, because his dad was once a home run hitter, too. And we carry the same phenomenon to the ballot box. We may never have seen our mayor face to face, but we can make the president a familiar face, and even a familiar name, as long as the name is the same of someone who has been president before.
Is this a bad thing? I do not judge. Human nature is human nature. We all need some stability. In the movies and television shows that express the way we think life ought to be, the same groups of friends pal around and meet for lunch and go out together day after day. In the era of "bowling alone," too many of us lack that, not as some suggest because of some immoral or anti-social rot in our souls, but because fast-paced change has ripped the threads that give texture to our lives.
How do we find the way back to such texture? I'm not sure. I suspect that a generation of presidents who all bear the same names, or a deepening fascination with the British royal family, will not restore a sense of rootedness. But I am an optimist. Over time, things which are true to nature endure, and things which violate nature fail to put down roots, and fail to endure. One way or another, social patterns that connect us with each other and with who we are at the deepest level will emerge. But it may take a while, a century or so of trial and error.
In the meantime, get ready for a few more presidents named Bush and Clinton. And maybe even a Kennedy or two. Or who knows - there could even be a Roosevelt, or a Lincoln. Until we find real connectedness, we'll manufacture fake connectedness.
The local McDonald's, built in this millenium, has great art-work depicting Victorian mansions. And our president is not only the son of the man who was president in 1989, but the descendant of the man who was president in 1853. Life has gotten too fast-paced? Who says? As the favorite song of President George Bush - uh, that's THE FIRST President Bush - assures us, just five miles off the interstate, American hasn't changed at all. Right?
(This was originally written in 1995, after the Democrats lost the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1940s, and there was a lot of soul-searching going on.)
Harland Hoisington
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