How to Build a Dynasty that Lasts for A Thousand Years
A Review of Leaving a Legacy by Johann Kurtz
Welcome back, and thank you for reading! Today’s article is about my thoughts regarding dynasty, as guided by the wonderful book my friend Johann Kurtz just published, with even a thought on how this relates to Elon’s goal of colonizing Mars. If you enjoy this post or find it interesting, please tap the heart icon to “like” it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it. Thanks! Also, you can click here to listen to the audio version!
A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just. -Proverbs 13:22 KJV
Leaving a Legacy
My friend Johann Kurtz has written an excellent book, Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families. This is not a book about the minutiae of estate planning, nor is it a harangue regarding what people ought be doing but aren’t, as is typical of the genre on X (Twitter).
It is, rather, a defense of dynasty. An appeal to those who think of the next generations, and call for them to do so with a focus on virtue, wisdom, and infinitely long time horizons. A call for those with resources to move past the present, neurotic focus on “meritocracy” (a term that originated in socialist literature just a few decades ago, as Kurtz notes)1, bootstraps, and giving it all away to “philanthropy” at the end of life, and instead focus on legacy.
The New Upper Class
That makes it, in short, a book about cultivating the right impulses and directing those amongst us who would at present be mere “elites” into a new upper class. This is, in fact, a point Kurtz makes explicitly: “Elites are the most successful and wealthy men within a given generation. An ‘upper class’, however, forms when these clites intermarry, and successfully preserve and pass on their wealth and status - when they create dynasties. Elites gain power, while an upper class inherits.”
The recreation of such a class matters because demographic trends mean we stand at a precipice: those who currently own tens of trillions of dollars of wealth are reaching their final years, and so the greatest wealth transfer in history looms. Perhaps $100 trillion will change hands, and how it does so will change the face of our world.
One option—the one Kurtz’s book is written as a broadside against—is that those who are dying will effectively disinherit their children, and the wealth will be donated to some philanthropic organization. At best, this will be a religious one that at least does some marginal good. At worst, this will be a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that uses it to promote the worst excesses of the Globalist American Empire both at home and abroad; the Ford Foundation comes to mind,2 as does George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Most likely, it will be some frivolous and mundane charity of a sort that is fitting for our feckless society; Simon Cowell is disinheriting his children in favor of a dog charity, for example.3
The other outcome is that it will be inherited by the descendants of those who are passing on. At worst, this might mean it’ll create more indolent trust fund kids. But it could also be the basis for a new class of pro-social stewards who live lives of vitality and virtue, much as the aristocrats of old—such as the Virginia gentry—did.
Inheritance does matter in that context, Kurtz argues, as there is no debate over whether there will be an economic elite—such is a fact of life—but rather over whether the elite is virtuous and focused on stewardship and higher ideals, or working some job that supports the lifestyle they grew up with, which primarily means banking or consulting.
As he notes, disinheritance to support dog charties or communist NGOs means, “instead of a young adult with a first-class upbringing and education taking stewardship of the family estate— a position of influence from which they could improve the lives of many —they will be forced to pursue a lucrative career in order to continue their family lifestyle, and the world only gains another financier or consultant.”
The former is important for, as Natalia put it on X, “IQ without vitality produces slavish cultures”,4 which is more or less the definition of the “finance bro” scene, a world of “men who sold their vitality to model returns on capital they’ll never own.”5 It’d be best if our leaders lived lives more vital than that.
Such does not mean that we ought cherish and try to preserve all the current elites, of course, nor even what remains of the upper class.
Many such types are louts; the Rockefellers dynasty comes to mind, as does Prince Harry. But it is important to note that what is wrong with those types is not inherited wealth, or wealth generally. They are in the wrong because they are not doing their duty. They are chasing temptation and ease rather than cultivating virtue while living lives of service. Such is a betrayal of the privileges they have been granted. As Kurtz notes in the context of King Edward VIII:
Edward’s decision to violate his kingly covenant while attempting to preserve his elevated lifestyle affected not just himself but his nation, and everyone who looked up to the institution he represented. It communicated to his citizens that their ancient order and morality and faith were dispensable should the temptations be sufficient.
This is why the wealthy man indulging his appetites while abandoning his duties is evil. Instead of elevating those around him through the projection of beauty, taste, manners, and sacrifice, he degrades himself and those around him by abandoning them, turning inwards, and leaving others to fall into envy and resentment.
So, how the wealth transfer "unfolds will shape civilization’s future,” as Kurtz notes in the book’s description. The end of it will see either Ford Foundations and frivolous layabouts, or a virtuous new upper class focused on the “classic, Western, Christian vision of family-centric charity, in which one generation gives to and teaches the next, so that each generation might do good and build strong, healthy, and beautiful communities.”
That choice is one we all must make, and what Kurtz does is make a compelling case for the latter.
Building the New Upper Class
The question then becomes how a mere elite can become an upper class, which is something that requires a great deal of intentionality and effort across domains. As this is largely the focus of the book, which you ought to buy and read, I don’t want to give too much away—particularly on the matter of true charity, which is an integral part of the book and Kurtz writes about in a far better way than I can even summarize.
However, I will go over a few highlights that are worth thinking about and relevant to the remainder of this article.
Virtue and Leadership
The first is the inculcation of virtue. No upper class remains one for long if its constituent members are not largely virtuous, or at least pro-social; even if the world can tolerate a few rakes, it can’t tolerate leeches.
This is something the old upper class in the Anglosphere did quite well.
In Britain, for example, the old Anglo-Norman Fitzwilliam family led the industry in coal mine safety improvements while paying the workers well, educating their kids, and keeping an eye on their health—as is profiled well in Aristocratic Enterprise: The Fitzwilliam Industrial Undertakings by Graham Mee—with the result that the laborers later helped them resist the goverment when it confiscated privately owned coal mines under PM Attlee. Similarly, it was Coke of Norfolk whose applied force of will and cultivation of knowledge and talent on his estate turned a sandy and impoverished patch of Leicester into one of the most fertile, rich, and agriculturally advanced estates in Britain.6 Overall, the aristocracy, though not solely focused on public utility, was looking for ways to help those who relied on it through encouraging scientific advancement in industry and agriculture, patronizing those who could develop improvements, encouraging infrastructure building, and so on.7
Similarly, in America, the old Tidewater aristocracy was defined by its noblesse oblige, as is argued in Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites, with the result that:
“The inferior and middling sort of people generally found the owner of the big estate courteous, kind, and the fair and understanding judge on the quorum, ready to extend a helping hand before his aid was sought. A gentleman knew his neighbors of every rank and called them by name. Above all, the leading planters were imbued with the belief that they constituted a class whose obligations to serve and to govern well must be fulfilled in return for the privileges which were their birthright.”
Such served as the basis of their longtime political power, a story Clifford Dowdey tells well in The Great Plantation and The Virginia Dynasties.8 Eventually, they lost their wealth, and their social preeminence faded. But while they were wealthy, the Tidewater planters had a demonstrable sense of pro-social virtue, cultivated and inculcated by their Christian faith and deep reading of ancient authors like Plutarch, which led to them being a generally hereditary and positive leadership caste for over two centuries.9
In contrast, the Yankee upper class largely eschewed its duty, particularly after the War Between the States. Characterized by types like the yacht-dwelling Astors and Jack Morgan,10 or the Livingstons with their palatial palaces and shrinking estates along the Hudson River,11 they glorified indolence and leisure, reclining in torpor rather than building and leading. This even extended to political leadership, the then-traditional preserve of the upper class, with the result that British visitors were awestruck by their apathy and the low esteem in which their countrymen held them. As Barbara Tuchman notes in The Proud Tower:
Forty years later the Englishman James Bryce was struck by the “apathy among the luxurious classes and fastidious minds,” and devoted a whole chapter in The American Commonwealth to “Why the Best Men Do Not Go into Politics.” They lacked a sense of noblesse oblige. The “indifference of the educated and wealthy classes” was due partly, he thought, to the lack of respect in which they were held by the masses. “Since the masses do not look to them for guidance, they do not come forward to give it.”
That dull dormancy of the Yankee upper class contrasts strongly with what it had once been, characterized by Kurtz in Leaving a Legacy by John Hancock of Boston, a man who was indubitably an economic elite, and whose wise use of that wealth led to him being an often-elected political leader, leader of the Revolution, and figure respected by high and low alike in Boston. As Kurtz notes:
Hancock even became godfather to the children of several of these partners. They were loyal for life. When one, William Palfrey, was lost at sea, Hancock supported his widow and her two sons, putting both boys through Harvard.
His application in these manners was not, of course, entirely selfless. It won him widespread loyalty and political power in the city. When Patriot agitators Samuel Adams and James Otis incited unrest to precipitate a revolt against Britain, the mob wrecked the houses of the rich but refused to touch that of Hancock-the finest of all.
Virtue cannot be avoided, and indolence is no virtue. The point of leaving a legacy is to encourage the next generations to focus on serving and leading, guiding their countrymen toward doing what is right and proper while inspiring them to “pursue the same virtues.” It is to create future generations of men like George Washington, Robert E Lee, and John Hancock—men who lead with wisdom and encourage, by their own example, a flourishing of virtue.
Blood Sports and Danger
Another related aspect of the upper class is the hobbies in which it engages.
An elite that is not an upper class engages in amusements—at this point, generally golf—that are pleasant, gather friends (or business associates), and largely lack thrill or danger. They, like the commercial bankers, insurance salesmen, and real estate brokers who play them, are generally fun but sedate and require a great deal of otherwise pointless effort in practice, which keeps out the masses. Other than not crying on the sporting field and learning how to make small talk, nothing much is learned or taught by them, nor are positive traits inculcated. They’re just amusements.
Such contrasts strongly with the traditional preserve of the upper-class: blood sports. In both America and Britain, this has long meant bird shooting (generally quail, grouse, or pheasant) and fox-hunting, along with occasional stag or deer stalk hunts. Back before fox hunting became immensely popular in the early 19th century,12 boar hunting was the prevalent bloodsport, as Kurtz noted in our podcast.
Those activities are different than golf or the other amusements of an economic elite that’s not an upper class, in that they, particularly fox-hunting, are dangerous; they require skill and a willingness to tolerate significant risk of bodily harm (as does polo) despite the life of ease and comfort one could be living. Further, unlike sedate amusements of the golf type, they get the blood up: the reason the British landed elite hunted so much (particularly fox hunting) was that the bloody violence of the sport accustomed them to the brutal killings that were required of them as the traditional officer corps of HM’s Army. Whereas the plutocrats were unaccustomed to keeping cool while watching bloody violence in a position of personal danger and thus made poor officers, the gentry and aristocrats knew how to stay comfortable around violence and danger, which was the whole point.
It should be no surprise, then, that the few bastions of upper-class life in America are scenes of bloodsports. Thomasville, GA is renowned for quail hunting, and Middleburg, VA is known for fox-hunting; both are dominated by large estates that have been held for a century or longer by the same old families, many of which still exercise at least some political control at the state and local level, and are forces to be reckoned with in the business community. The same is true of what remains of traditional British country house life, though fox-hunting is technically banned there.
As Kurtz notes well in Leaving a Legacy and as we discussed in our podcast, the acclimation to violence and danger cultivated by such sports (and others, such as fencing and mountain climbing) is necessary. It teaches things you can’t learn in the classroom or with a sedate sport like golf, and does so in a ritualized and formal way befitting those who will lead, govern, and steward old estates.
Risk Tolerance and Not Selling Up
Finally, there is the fact that those families that exist for a millennium—the goal of Kurtz’s book—have to hold onto assets for a very, very long time, or at least not lose everything irretrievably over that period. Only a few such families exist, in fact (the best of them are profiled in Aristocrats by Robert Lacey), and the small handful that do have largely managed it by wise stewardship of assets generation after generation.
By far the most successful of these is the Grosvenor family of England, which came across with William in 1066, set up in Chester, and remains there to this day. The family is the wealthiest peerage family in Britain, and now owns hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land, most of the posh London neighborhoods of Mayfair and Belgravia, and other business interests and real estate developments that span the world.13 And they have used that to do great, or at least admirable, things. Bendor Westminster, the Second Duke, was instrumental in settling Rhodesia,14 invented the armored car (and became a war hero by leading such a unit to rescue POWs from the Ottomans), and was one of the few peers with the courage to resist the damnable Parliament Bill (alongside him was Lord Willoughby de Broke, a famous fox-hunter whose political courage was evidently sharpened by that dangerous sport).
While others live in their shade, and few families are as old as they, they are representative of a trend across the British elite: the plutocratic personalities and families rise and fall, and often are richer than the old peerage families, but it is the old Anglo-Norman families that remain consistently wealthy over time, and compound their wealth in a remarkable way despite extortionate death and income taxes.
Such is even confirmed by the data, rather than just anecdotes. A study titled Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth found,15 using probate data, that the old, landed aristocratic families remain consistently wealthier over time than plutocratic families. That is because, though poorer than the plutocrats in specific periods, such as the Edwardian Era, they are less likely to lose it all and go belly up and are consistently able to build wealth rather than just compound it (though not, generally, in the spectacular way many of the nouveau riche have).
Why is that? They are rooted and learn to be stewards. Their wealth is generally illiquid, as it is in business interests, agricultural land, and real estate rather than easily sellable stocks or bonds. It is also composed of assets to which they have a connection—particularly blocks of agricultural land—and which carry with them duties and responsibilities (managing the tenants, checking for violations, investing in local talent, etc), rather than just a steady dividend check. Further, as such assets are income-producing rather than mere speculative plays like gold, crypto, or non-dividend stocks, they do not have to be sold for the family to profit from them, and so their time horizons can extend to the infinite…or at least the long term.
Such encourages a different attitude than merely holding even a great deal of money in a brokerage account. It requires the parents to teach their children to manage it, if it is to be held for future generations. It encourages rootedness and stewardship, which are pro-social and help draw talent to often rural communities while encouraging the family’s involvement with the community. This is something that benefited the Grosvenors tremendously, and let them benefit those who relied on them (check out the footnote for a great passage on this).16
And the loyalty that develops between the great families and their retainers as part of the decades-long asset stewardship process is something that doesn’t exist for much of the nouveau riche, and is another reason the old, landed families do better: they are still aristocrats, and have people on whom they can rely. As Lacey notes of the Grosvenors:
“But family retainers, whatever their other shortcomings, are loyal. They derive something of their masters’ satisfaction from serving a cause greater than the here and now. They see themselves as part of the family, setting their endeavours in the same time-defeating family context which stretches back into the past and forward into the future. They defend the family interests as if they were their own, and it was in this spirit that George Ridley prepared to do battle to save the Grosvenor inheritance from the hands of the Inland Revenue in 1947.”
The fellow mentioned, George Ridley, succeeded. He remained loyal, was immensely competent, and was involved with the family (particularly Bendor Grosvenor) for long enough that he knew exactly what to do. Such is likely untrue of the “wealth advisor” at Vanguard or some other brokerage on which liquid wealth-heavy families tend to rely.
But few of us can establish vast agricultural estates. That means that building and running a family business is the next best thing, as Kurtz argues, as it, when done properly, encourages the same sort of virtuous actions and behaviors. Explaining some key ways to avoid failure when handing down such a business, he notes:
A common failure mode for dynasties is for the heir to enter the family business too late, find himself surrounded by experienced professionals who are the same age as him but radically more competent, lose confidence, and retreat in embarrassment.
Another failure mode results from an excess of the opposite instinct, whereby parents undermine the performance of the family business by overly protecting their children and shutting out talented individuals from outside the caste. Enterprises become pathological when new talent has no way of entering, and incompetents have no way of being released.
Thus, in addition to the attention which you give your own children, consider from a young age giving special support to other select youth who could become their peers and friends, and fostering a friendly sense of competition among the group, even if your ultimate responsibility is to your own child.
The general mindset is what matters, not the specifics of the asset, and this mindset was well summarized by Amy Licence in The Lost Kings: “Medieval nobles had a strong sense of themselves as temporary custodians of dynastic possession, which it was their job to tend, increase and hand on to the next in line.” Such a view survived for centuries, as Beckett noted in The Aristocracy in England, and was still intact into the 20th century:
Since estates were a trust from generation to generation, the ethos demanded that they be preserved, and preferably improved. Not all heirs could be relied upon to accept this responsibility, although the land laws usually prevented them from wreaking irredeemable havoc. For the majority, however, duty to the family - and, by extension, to the state - meant looking to develop the economic potential of the estate, whether by improving the farming, or exploiting the natural resources (timber and minerals), or by improving the value by urban development. Most chose to be rentiers, in whichever of these roles they were playing, largely because the wealthier members of the elite expected to spend a considerable proportion of their time away from their estates. But being a rentier was not the same as opting out; indeed, the role that they played resembled that of director, and most played it with considerable acumen, despite the absence of any formal training.
Such remains the goal, the state of being toward which we must work. It’s also what Kurtz writes about so well.
This Does Matter
It is important to remember that this does matter. It matters a great deal, in fact. As Kurtz notes, “The West was built on multi-generational, divinely-inspired great works, which are impossible to continue if we perform a hard reset every generation and consign our children to forevermore trawling LinkedIn while they are ruled over by nouveau riche tech and finance oligarchs.”
That is undoubtedly true. Colonization required sustained efforts over generations, and the families that did the most to shape how it turned out were the ones who successfully passed on wealth and power, along with virtue and a sense of leadership, generation after generation.
For example, until the war, Virginia was the most successful state in the Union. It was wealthy, prosperous, and did more than any other to shape the face of the new Republic for almost all of its first century. It could only do so because of the dynasties that ruled it, and which stewarded and used their wealth to focus on learning, cultivation, and political influence. They had arrived not with Jamestown, but relatively soon after, and then built for centuries. Because of their focus on dynasty and power over the long term, their vision and lines remained alive for multiple centuries.
Similarly, as Ron Morkel tells in Rhodesia: Beginning to End, his family got there near-immediately after the Pioneer Column established the first city. His grandfather then worked incredibly hard to create a flourishing mining empire, and soon succeeded…only to then build a farming empire as well! His sons, then grandsons, carried on the project until Mugabe destroyed it. My friend Rory Duncan’s family history is quite similar. Such men were those who built Rhodesia, who turned a virgin land stuck in the Stone Age into the most flourishing state in Africa.
Even in settled lands like England, it took decades, generations even, of (very expensive) agricultural improvements to ensure the Agricultural Revolution happened as it did and could feed the Industrial Revolution. In contrast, the American railroad buildout was quite harmed by the Vanderbilts being feckless overspenders.
All that is to say: a real upper class is a hugely pro-social force. A rapacious oligarchy is not. A miserly plutocracy is not. And a “professional” elite that’s always thinking about the next scheme or round of golf, rather than the next generation and a continued sense of tradition, certainly is not.
But a real, aristocratic upper class in the model of America’s founding gentlemen or their British peers certainly is. As classic (though fictional) British gentleman Mr. Darcy is described at the turning point of Pride and Prejudice, “He is the best landlord, and the best master…that ever lived; not like the wild young men nowadays, who think of nothing but themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but will give him a good name. Some people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw anything of it. To my fancy, it is only because he does not rattle away like other young men.”
Such is the model we ought be shooting for, and Leaving a Legacy lays out the path toward doing so, which is what makes it an immensely valuable book.
The Martian Example
There is one example of this I thought of while reading the book (though Kurtz sticks to more serious and less speculative concepts): colonizing Mars, particularly Elon colonizing Mars.
Such is what Elon has said is his goal for SpaceX.17 The point isn’t just to get to Mars, poke around it while doing “science,” and then leave. No, it is to—eventually—launch thousands of Starship rockets and build a thriving colony, including a functional city, on Mars.18 He wants to put a million people there over just a few decades, and use those pioneers to colonize a dead planet.19
That is possible. As Robert Zubrin has articulated in great books like The Case for Space and The New World on Mars, many of the early steps can be done with current technology. Even actually colonizing the planet—building a new world inhabited by millions upon millions on it and terraforming it into one with a breathable atmosphere and liquid oceans—is possible.20
But it’ll take a long time. About a thousand years, in fact (give or take a century or two). Even getting the city he wants up and running will likely take longer than his lifetime. Thus, if Elon wants to ensure that Mars is terraformed and colonized in line with his vision for the planet, he can’t just hope for the best. Nor, as shown by Kurtz’s takedown of the Ford Foundation in Leaving a Legacy, can he hope a non-profit or other sort of NGO will stick to his vision; the Ford Foundation of today would be an abomination in Henry’s eyes.
No, if Elon wants Mars to be colonized according to his long-term vision, he’ll have to raise a dynasty built around everything that will go into that: business acumen, prudent risk taking, standing up to woke and climate-worshipping authorities, the intelligence to understand astrophysics, the personal skills to manage a colony in a deadly environment…and much more. What’s more, he’ll have to do so not just for the next generation, but for a line that lasts as long as that of the Grosvenors or Percys.
In far less extreme circumstances, the Virginians did this. Virginia was filled with yeomen and small planters, of course, but it was a few great dynasties that dominated the state and guided its creation and development. Particularly, after the House of Byrd descended into penury, it was the Lees, the Randolphs, the Carters, and the Harrisons. All came in the early 1600s, and lasted until the post-Civil War economic changes made their existence impossible. The Carters were defined throughout that history, which included taming a murderous and deadly land not entirely unlike Mars would be, by their superb management skill, impressive financial acumen, and prudence lasting over generations.
That’s the sort of dynasty Elon will have to create, and he’ll have to create one that lasts three times as long. Such is possible, but it will be difficult. His dynasty will need to stand up to the GDP maximizer types with their short time horizons and myopic concerns on squeezing the profit lemon to the point of exhaustion. His dynasty will need to reject the nature worshippers who claim colonization and terraforming are bad because of vague notions regarding the sacred soil of a dead planet. He’ll have to combat the “Whitey on the Moon” (listen below) types who destroyed our past attempts at space exploration and colonization to fund welfare programs and aid to decolonized Africa. It will need great courage, in addition to great skill.
What that means is that Elon must go about his training of the next generation, namely his son, X Æ A-12, whom he takes around to events, with the same diligence and time horizons that he has used to build his companies. Much as the Virginia Dynasties, the British landed elite, and others of similar backgrounds were raised in environments that forged them into the monumentally pro-social and successful forces they were generation after generation, he’ll have to do that with his progeny. And the stakes will not be that the manor home will have to be rented out, but that the whole dream could die in the panic of a breached dome, a crashed supply ship, or a business mistake.
Fortunately, he now has a resource to consult as he sets about building such a thousand-year family: Leaving a Legacy, which is focused on exactly that.
Featured image credit: Jeff Buck / Bronze Equestrian Statue of Hugh Lupus, 1st Earl of Chester
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As he tells it:
Like charity, the question of inheritance is beset by doubts. We are told that justice requires an absolute level playing-field each generation, in keeping with the Western ideal of meritocracy. But what if I told you that meritocracy is actually a very recent term - coined only a few decades ago, and originally meant as a negative and a criticism?
Kurtz, describing how the Ford Foundation became the monstrosity that it is, notes that it was “democratized” in the years dragged on, and those who took over turned it into the horror show we now think of it as:
As the influence of those outside the family grew, priorities shifted away from the traditional Michigan focus of Henry Ford and his progeny.
In 1950, the trustees signed the Report of the Study of the Ford Foundation on Policy and Program, announcing five ‘areas of action’: economic improvements, education, freedom and democracy, ‘human behavior’, and world peace. They decided that their responsibility was no longer just Michigan—it was the world.
To better fulfill this self-proclaimed global mandate, the trustees judged that they had to be in a global city. In 1953, the foundation transferred its base of operations from Detroit to New York. It also gradually divested itself of Ford Motor Company stock, adopting a generic investment portfolio instead.
It was becoming what historian Dwight Macdonald described as “a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some.” Henry Ford’s Detroit was left to crumble. By the 1970s, Henry Ford Il’s loss of control was near-total, with then-president McGeorge Bundy flatly denying Ford’s requests for donations to the Henry Ford Hospital.
Described well in this great post: https://x.com/_The_Prophet__/status/1982585117836238894
For those interested, this story is told particularly well in Coke of Norfolk and His Friends, Vol. 1 of 2
As JV Beckett notes in The Aristocracy in England, 1660-1914:
On the other hand the principle of public utility was always in the minds of aristocrats, and when this could be shown their support was almost guaranteed. To this end they promoted agricultural shows, and acted as patrons to farming and engineering societies; once public benefit could be shown for a canal or railway, they asked only for reasonable compensation (although some lesser landowners and freeholders may have held out for extortionate sums); and, far from acting as moguls and pharaohs in urban development, they used their lease controls to ensure well-maintained streets and houses. Above all, the key to their attitude lay in Parliament. Although they are best known for their public roles, including defending the landed interest via the Corn Laws and similarly reactionary legislation, the majority played a vital role - in both houses - steering through locally significant legislation. Enclosure, turnpike, canal and railway improvements all required legislation, which could only be obtained by careful guidance through Parliament: hence the importance of aristocratic approval in advance of proposed communications improvements. Even if aristocrats were not leading industrialists - and this was largely because the limits of their enterprise usually stopped at the boundary of their estates - they played a vital role on behalf of business interests in Parliament, partly because entrepreneurs failed to penetrate Westminster in any numbers before the mid-nineteenth century.
For example, he notes, in The Great Plantation:
Within four and, at the most five, generations from the arrival of the first obscure settlers in Indian country, families such as the Lees, the Washingtons and Jeffersons, the Harrisons of Berkeley Hundred, had grown sufficiently imperious to challenge the might of Great Britain and lead an armed rebellion that a new nation might be created on earth—for themselves.
They not only had imperiousness, they possessed the true leadership, and this, too, developed from the plantation culture. These men had the habit of authority, they were familiar with the assumption of responsibility, and making decisions was second nature. In the period of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary leaders (the Virginia Dynasty), covering roughly the half century from 1770 to 1820, when Virginia produced more giants in a single era than any other region in America before or since, the plantation culture reached its fullest flowering and the aristocratic republic attained its “golden age.”
As Dowdey notes in The Golden Age: A Climate for Greatness:
The age was golden for a few because — with a few exceptions, of men themselves well connected - only those whose families had established them in positions of inherited wealth had the time and the means to devote the center of their interests and the direction of their energies into assuming the responsibilities of government. This meant quite literally “the responsibilities of government” as opposed to the partisan actions of party politics. Men maneuvered for position and rivalries caused personal enmities, but a political party as such was unknown. Since the holding of high office was, with rare exceptions, restricted to families of the ruling order, and in the Council, the upper house of the General Assembly, appointments were practically hereditary and held for life, the leaders could concentrate on governing the Colony without having their attention diverted by wooing constituents.
Jack Morgan contrasts quite strongly with his father, JP Morgan. Chernow’s The House of Morgan is a good book on that point
As noted by Clare Brandt of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Livingstons in her An American Aristocracy: The Livingstons
As the great-granddaughter of William Backhouse Astor, Margaret Livingston Chanler Aldrich could easily afford to subscribe to the contemporary view that “money-getting . . . comes from rather a low instinct. . . it is scarcely met with in combination with the finer or more interesting traits of character.” Her society—old New York society-had begun to look down its nose at “money-getting” a generation before, when the post-Civil War influx of new wealth first threatened to overwhelm its traditional structures and alliances. By the outbreak of the First World War, this ripple of disparagement had grown into a tidal wave: social New York, equating earning power with vulgarity, looked down on “ ‘successful’ men” as incapable of “humor, thought or refinement. A set of mere money-getters and traders, they [are] essentially unattractive.”
Unfortunately this attitudinal wave crested about the same time that the graduated income tax became the law of the land. After passage of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, followed three years later by a progressive estate tax, many of the belittlers of “money-getting” had to reassess their position. A number of Livingston proprietors on the Hudson’s east bank, for example, changed their tune and emulated their ancestors: they went to work, and in the process reinvigorated the Livingston family tradition of accomplishment in the worlds of American finance, trade and the professions.
This story is told well in The England of Nimrod and Surtees, 1815-1854
Describing these back in the 1980s, Lacey noted:
By the commonly accepted laws of history, politics and logic, people like Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster, should not still exist in the 1980s. In classical Greek ‘aristos’ meant ‘the best’, and ‘aristokratia’ meant ‘rule by the best’ , as opposed to “demokratia’ - government by the ‘demos’ or ‘people’ - and since 1945 Britain’s democratically elected governments have laboured more or less consistently to abolish, or at least to reduce, the wealth enjoyed by the aristocracy.
They have, evidently, met with less than total success. When the photographer Patrick Lichfield, himself an Earl and husband of Gerald Grosvenor’s elder sister Leonora, was wondering one Christmas what to give his young brother-in-law, he hit on the idea of a Monopoly Board marked out with the properties from which the Duke of Westminster collects rents in real life. It naturally included Grosvenor Square, as well as Park Lane, Mayfair and Belgravia, and though the Earl could not discover any Grosvenor-owned railway stations, he was able to fill those spaces with the foreign airports the Duke lands at to inspect his properties.
One recent analysis of the Grosvenor assets set their value in the region of £400 million, 300 of London’s most select and expensive acres, the family properties in and around Chester, several large rural estates like Abbeystead, a couple of jewellery companies, a company developing provincial shopping precincts, and an expanding network of international investments which extend as far as Australia, San Francisco, Vancouver and Hawaii.
Technically the ownership of this massive business empire is tied up in a complexity of Grosvenor family trusts, yet the businesses themselves have no doubt about the identity of their ultimate boss. In the penultimate decade of the twentieth century, Britain’s richest man is still a duke.
This is described well in Bendor: The Golden Duke of Westminster by Leslie Fields
As Lacey notes in Aristocrats:
The first and obvious decision was to sell all Bend Or’s stocks and shares and to transfer that capital into land, for stocks and shares have a defined price on the day that a man dies. There can be no arguing about their value. But the real worth of a piece of land can be haggled over endlessly: short-term cash losses could be created by investing in sluggish farms and developments that would, on paper, be of relatively low value on the day of death - and, most important of all, there were the considerably reduced rates of death duty levied on agricultural land and on land given over to forestry.
So suddenly, in the late 1940s, obscure corners of the Grosvenors’ estates found themselves benefiting from the cash released by the sale of Bend Or’s stocks and shares. The Duke of Westminster appeared overcome with a tree-planting urge, putting down thousands of acres to spruce, larch and pine with a mystifying disregard for the advice of government forestry experts, whose approval meant qualifications for government grants: whether he got the grants or not, the Duke went on planting out his forests.
In 1950 he bought nearly 6000 acres in Shropshire belonging to the Bridgewater family, and in 1951 he diversified into rural industry. The little port of Kinlochbervie, standing on Grosvenor land in the northwest corner of Scotland (acquired through the family’s nineteenth-century connection with the Dukes of Sutherland) found itself the focus of an ambitious development plan.
Grosvenor money was poured into this obscure village and its surrounding area to reopen the harbour, build a cold store and create a transport system whereby fish that were landed one evening could be marketed next morning in Aberdeen and Glasgow.
It was, on the face of it, a quixotic gesture, for on the day Bend Or died in July 1953 there was no way his estate could immediately recoup the millions of pounds he had invested in agricultural land, forests and developments like Kinlochbervie. The money sunk into the silted-up harbour there could even have been presented to the valuers of the Inland Revenue as a loss.
But by the mid-1960s the little port had become a thriving and very profitable concern which it was possible to sell off to a local syndicate. So the Grosvenor estate did not just minimize death duties and make a long-term investment which proved most remunerative. They also got the credit for reviving a rundown rural community and for handing it back as a going concern to the locals.
I'm probably not the audience for work like this but I enjoy reading it nonetheless.
I'd love to be in a position to make these kind of considerations one day but until then the path of the social climber is all I can hope for.
Inherited wealth makes scientific advances possible, too. It is extremely unlikely that either Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein would have embarked on their careers without it. While I chose to study electrical engineering for financial reasons, it is my goal to give my future children the economic security and education they would need to become Gentleman Scientists.
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/the-gentleman-scientist