A little more kin, and more than kind

In Praise of Nepotism

Adam Bellow

Doubleday: 576 pp., $30

*

“Nepotism, n. Appointing your grandmother to office for the good of the party.” This definition figures in Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary,” which has a lighter step than Adam Bellow’s apparently outrageous -- in fact judiciously balanced -- defense of the habit of favoring kin, friends and clients.

Bellow tells us that nepotism “actually derives from the Italian nepote, which can refer to any family member, of any generation, male or female. The term nepotismo was coined some time in the fourteenth or fifteenth century to describe the corrupt practice of appointing papal relatives to office ... usually illegitimate sons described as ‘nephews.’ ” The point is nicely made, even if the Italian for nephew is actually nipote.

By way of declaring his interest, Bellow turns a brief, modest spotlight on himself in confessing that he is, as already widely suspected, the son of Saul and that his career in publishing has been conducted in the amiable light of reflected glory. It is not, however, his own eased, if not easy, ascent that he defends but the general principle of looking after one’s own, or those adjacent to them.

Bellow maintains that the attempt, by legal interdiction, to fabricate a “just” world, in which there is no advantage in being well connected, can result in the preferment of the least fit. It is unnatural for a society to deprive itself of the most active use of the best genes in its pool. Elites wax and wane, however: Societies can become so nepotistic that they lose the muscle, and numbers, to defend their own territory (the Boston Brahmins are a brilliant example). Though its exclusiveness led the New England Puritan commonwealth to take on “the attributes of a closed and sinking caste,” the Quakers, who made a principle of embracing everyone as a brother, shaped a national ethos in which people become American because they really want to. (How many get to be French that way?)

Despite all the legislation that seeks to embargo it, “good nepotism” is a persistent human phenomenon. You might as well legislate against the circulation of the blood. Fathers set examples and tradition makes demands; families give kudos, courage and sometimes cash to new generations. Society is not the history of class wars but of clans and families that clash and cooperate. Kinship supplies the grammar of human life: Oedipus’ family ceased to make sense when the father was the brother of his own children as well as the child of his wife.

There is, and should be, a gap between generations. There are, of course, good sons and bad sons (some of whom become good). Bellow makes his point by reference to the 2000 presidential election, asserting that it “was a referendum not on the validity of dynastic succession in a democracy but on which kind of successor we prefer. The Prodigal Son (Bush) ... defeated the Dutiful Son (Gore).” Americans, he claims, favor a young man who has sown some wild oats. It’s amusing to say so, but is it valid? If the election were a referendum, Gore would have been the winner: Referendums are decided by a simple majority of the votes cast. (Bierce might have dared to say that Gore failed to enjoy a victory by receiving the most votes because his clan didn’t have the foresight to install a brother as governor of a decisive state.)

Later on, we are told that JFK won his presidential election by the smallest known plurality, which proves, in his case, that it was wise to have a dad well connected in the Mafia and adjacent businesses. Bellow may not endorse bad nepotism, but he has a soft spot for success by any means and at almost any cost. As a pragmatist, Bellow does not consider it repugnant that Joe Kennedy’s “contributions to mayors Richard Daley ... and Robert Wagner, among others, paid off handsomely. (The election was followed by very plausible allegations of fraud.)” That’s some parenthesis to smuggle into a eulogy.

Bellow’s serious defense of nepotism is based on the claim that families are natural: “Reciprocal altruism” is widely practiced among animals. But what is good or bad cannot be established by nature: Green may be good, but it is not good because it is green. In the 20th century, totalitarians tried a similar trick with social Darwinism. Making natural selection into a form of justice, Nazi and communist programs proposed to reform man by the mass extermination of “weak” or “inferior” groups.

The benign sound of reciprocal altruism seems to justify a return to the argument from nature, but it won’t do: Man is in many ways a willfully unnatural creature, an exploiter and inventor, a language animal capable of articulate speculations beyond the scope of other earthly creatures. Never mind how much we have genetically in common with chimpanzees; what remains significant, and astounding, is how we differ from them. Given the chance, wo/man can be a fanatic (what animals are fanatical?), a saint, an egalitarian, a tyrant or even a Saul or Adam Bellow. Not fair, is it?

It is nice to find evidence that families are more durable than legislators, imperialists and idealists, but to make kinship an excuse for political partiality is frivolous. “The Godfather” supplies nice drama and “The Sopranos” some savage comedy, but the Mafia is not a model for a grown-up society. There are reciprocally altruistic offers that should be refused.

Nepotism is a recurrent weakness and occasional strength throughout U.S. history. At its worst, it bars the advancement of outsiders. Often, yesterday’s out-group tries to rig the market: “Only the introduction of Civil Service exams -- a great cause of reformers like [Franklin D.] Roosevelt -- allowed Jews to begin to replace the Irish in municipal jobs in Boston and New York.... American-born Italians often saw newly arrived Irish priests promoted over their heads.” The rise of Roosevelt, however, was a function of his emulation of cousin Teddy, and his self-confidence derived from his family’s social eminence. Like the Gracchi (whom Bellow does not mention in his ancient Roman excursion), FDR was a renegade toff whose family furnished him with the energy to -- as piqued peers saw it -- betray his class for the benefit of the republic. However, his neglect of his children led to the decline of his clan. (Doug Wead’s “All the Presidents’ Children” offers a caustic footnote here.)

Bellow gives an always illuminating and often enjoyable anecdotal history of the ways in which American presidents sought, sometimes high-mindedly, to advance their kin and cronies. Abraham Lincoln was besieged by the latter before even leaving Springfield, Ill.: “Having contracted a slight case of smallpox, he said to his secretary, ‘Tell all the office-seekers to come at once, for now I have something I can give to all of them.’ ” Lincoln is shrewdly observed to be the last politician who appealed to the idea of the nation as a family, during the 1860 presidential campaign. “When the Civil War began,” Bellow observes, “a deeply divided country could still be addressed as a household. By the end, though it was united as never before, this metaphor no longer applied.”

Bellow argues that George Washington’s childlessness led him to regard the population as his adopted children and so foster an enduring republic. He might have contrasted him with Oliver Cromwell, who established a commonwealth in England and who sought, or may have been persuaded, to have his son succeed him. “Tumbledown Dick,” as he was called, was no Oliver, and the Stuarts were recalled. The Puritans made for Plymouth Rock, and history took its course.

Bellow is at his best on native soil, and his forays into the ancient world are fun, though they lack clinching detail. Since Alcibiades was Pericles’ nipote(in fact, his ward), it seems pertinent to assert that he “edged aside the natural sons of Pericles and claimed the great man’s mantle.” In fact, not much edging was needed: All Pericles’ legitimate sons died before him, which is why the Athenians had given him permission to adopt his historically unsung son by Aspasia, who was both a hetaira (not his legal wife) and a foreigner. To assert that Alcibiades was “exhibit A” in Socrates’ trial is misguided; the philosopher’s alleged association with the oligarchs known as the Thirty Tyrants was much more damaging. Bellow’s comparison of Alcibiades with Augustus is equally farfetched, even if both were proteges of great men. Augustus’ uncle, the “divine” Julius Caesar, is here said to have been “a stickler for the traditional virtues,” which has to be the biggest laugh in the book. It is truer of the lecherous Augustus, who decreed that other people should be moral, often the orderly wish of the dictatorial. Plutarch was wiser than Bellow in comparing Alcibiades with Coriolanus: Both combined strategic genius with vanity and charisma; each turned his genius against his own city on account of wounded pride.

Bellow fails entirely to look at the incest typical both of ancient Egypt and of Greek tyrannies in the Aegean, notably that of Mausolus (he of the mausoleum), who married his sister in the 4th century BC. Incest kept things in the family. The modern trust fund is an economic metastasis of incest, enabling neo-tyrants and pirates -- Kennedys, Rockefellers, Fords and others -- to trump corporate raiders and tax collectors, pro bono privato (but Edsel Ford still had to go).

Bellow deserves high, if not full, marks for a never boring, often informative, somewhat cliche-cluttered antidote to Andre Gide’s anathema “Familles, je vous hais” (Families, I hate you). There is heart, generosity and -- slightly rueful? -- filial affection here: Kinship vindicated, the earnest son and the prodigal father find common ground in print.