America into World War II. Because of his family's involvement with the Nazis, this would later
pose a very different problem for Andover senior Poppy Busage. h than for the ordinary young man his
Meanwhile, the social whirl went on. A couple of weeks after Pearl Harbor, during Christmas
vacation, George went to a cotillion at the Round Hill Country Club in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was a social affair attended by upcoming debutantes and acceptable young men. ''@s2@s3 Here George Bush met his future wife, Barbara Pierce, whose family was in the High Society set in nearby Rye, New York. Barbara was an attractive 16-year-old girl, athletic like George's mother. She was home for the holidays from her exclusive boarding school, Ashley Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina. Her breeding was acceptable: Barbara's background, though not quite so aristocratic as George's, was also socially impressive
in a day when Society was defined by breeding rather than wealth. Her father, Marvin Pierce, was a
distant nephew of President Franklin Pierce (1853-57).... Barbara's mother, Pauline Robinson ...
was [the daughter of] an Ohio Supreme Court justice. ''@s2@s4
Barbara's father, Marvin Pierce, was then vice president of McCall Corporation, publisher of
Redbook and McCall's magazines. After his daughter joined the banking oligarchy by marrying into
the Bush family (1945), Pierce became McCall's chief executive. Pierce and his magazine's theme
of `` Togetherness ''--stressing family social existence divorced from political, scientific, artistic or
creative activities--played a role in the cult of conformity and mediocrity which crushed U.S.mental life in the 1950s.
A great deal is made about Barbara Pierce Bush's family connection to U.S. President Franklin
Pierce. It is inserted in books written by Bush friends and staff members. Barbara Bush's gossip-
column biographer says: Her own great-great-great uncle President Franklin Pierce had his[White House] office in the Treaty Room.... '' In fact, President Pierce was a distant cousin of (^) Barbara Pierce's great-great grandfather, not his brother, as this claim would imply. ** ** [Established through consultation with the New Hampshire Historical Society and Pierce family experts in Pennsylvania, this fact is acknowledged by Mrs. Bush's White House staff.] Like the Henry III ancestral claim, Franklin Pierce may be a bad omen for George Bush. The catastrophic Pierce was refused renomination by his own political party. Pierce backed schemes to spread slavery by having mercenaries, called filibusters, '' invade Mexico, Central America and
the Caribben islands. During the Civil War, he attacked the Emancipation Proclamation that
outlawed black slavery in the rebel states. His former backers among the wealthy New Englandfamilies abandoned him and treated him like dirt. He died unmourned in 1869.
One may ask, in what way are President Bush and his backers conscious of an oligarchical
tradition? For a clue, let us look at the case of Arthur Burr Darling, George Bush's prep school
history teacher.
Just after Claude Fuess `` came into power with Hitler and Mussolini '' in 1933, Fuess brought
Darling in to teach. Dr. Darling was head of the Andover history department from 1937 to 1956,
and Faculty Guardian of one of the secret societies. His Political Changes in Massachusetts, 1824 to
1848 covered the period of Andover's eclipse by Boston's aristocratic opium lords. Darling's bookattacks Andover's greatest humanitarian, Jedidiah Morse, as a dangerous lunatic, because Morse
warned about international criminal conspiracies involving these respectable Bostonians. The same
book attacks President John Quincy Adams as a misguided troublemaker, responsible with Morse
for the anti-freemasonic movement in the 1820s-30s.