May 12, 2022 23‘Anxious for a Mayf lower’
Caroline Fraser
A Nation of Descendants :
Politics and the Practice of
Genealogy in US History
by Francesca Morgan.
University of North Carolina Press,
301 pp., $95.00; $29.95 (paper)Con artists are having a moment. The
latest crop features Elizabeth Holmes,
the deep- voiced, unblinking leader of the
fraudulent blood- testing start- up Ther-
anos, one of many cheats now starring
in books, podcasts, and dramatic tele-
vision serials, as if they had accom-
plished something.
Perhaps they have. Like Gatsby,
Holmes invented her celebrity and
fortune out of virtually nothing: a
smile, a wide and worshipful gaze,
and genealogy. A Cincinnati hospital
had been named for her great- great-
grandfather, a doctor who married into
the Fleisch mann yeast fortune. One of
Holmes’s earliest investors, initially du-
bious of a young woman who dropped
out of college after a year, was im-
pressed by her family history of success
in business and medicine, apparently
believing such expertise was magically
transferrable across generations.
Genealogy, it turns out, has played
a rich subterranean part in building
improbable expectations, according
to Francesca Morgan’s recent book, A
Nation of Descendants: Politics and
the Practice of Genealogy in US His-
tory. Probing the origins of American
genealogy, she finds that, from our
earliest years, it has been inflating our
most grandiose fantasies. While it has
served for some peoples—notably Af-
rican Americans—as a means of recov-
ering their history, finding a sense of
belonging, and expanding the country’s
social acceptance of once- despised mi-
norities, it has acted at the same time
as a tool of exclusion, promoting white
supremacy, the Lost Cause, and eugen-
ics. She quotes one “despairing profes-
sional” lamenting that “P. T. Barnum
missed his calling when he neglected to
become a genealogist.”Yet despite our long fascination with
family history, outsiders have also
picked up on an American ambiva-
lence toward it. Alexis de Tocqueville,
as Morgan notes, was initially charmed
by our democratic equality, with fami-
lies emerging “constantly out of noth-
ing, while others constantly fall back
into nothing.” The longer he observed
us, however, the more he was struck by
the fact that, even while repudiating
rank and class, the average American
was “secretly distressed” about his po-
sition in society. Every other yahoo, or
so it appeared, yearned to establish a
connection to “the first settlers of the
colonies,” whose descendants seemed
to the French aristocrat suspiciously
thick on the ground.
In the United States, genealogy be-
came a means of constructing a narra-
tive around identity, elevating oneself
from the rabble by finding links to
whatever passed for royalty in the blank
void of the New World: prominent
early colonists, soldiers who fought in
the Revolution, the Founding Fathers.
Not that aristocracy was forgotten.John Bernard Burke, whose Burke’s
Peerage, founded by his father in 1826,
became the great European guide to
inbreeding, profited off the pre–Civil
War vogue for heraldry among Amer-
icans willing to pay to prove a con-
nection to the finer English families
(no other nationality had the requisite
cachet), preferably those with crests,
which, though legally meaningless in
this country, could be displayed “on
their walls, on bookplates and other
similar items of property, or in jewelry
or cufflinks on their person.” Even su-
perficial relatedness was prized. Mor-
gan quotes Emerson ravished by “the
fair complexion, blue eyes and open
and florid aspects” of the English face.
Elsewhere, the Sage of Concord sighed
with regret over the lower order of la-
borers: “German & Irish nations, like
the Negro, have a deal of guano in their
destiny.” Such notions of hereditary
greatness, beloved by eugenicists, con-
gealed into the pseudoscientific foun-
dation of white Christian supremacy.
It was during the Gilded Age, as
American society became increasingly
status- conscious and stratified, that
genealogy experienced its first explo-
sive rise. “Genealogy... joined manners,
dress, food ways, and home furnish-
ings in the toolboxes of Americanswho wished to rise in society,” Mor-
gan writes. Hereditary organizations
were founded, often by and for women,
largely white women (with a few im-
portant exceptions), a movement that
eventually contributed to the rise of
women’s social and political clubs gen-
erally. Morgan quotes a letter from a
Boston genealogist describing a female
client in Wahpeton, North Dakota,
who was, as so many were, “anxious
for a Mayflower.” The Daughters of the
American Revolution (DA R), founded
in 1890, was typical of such groups,
allowing women barred from most
professions to hold meetings, study
history, and attain research skills that
were potentially marketable. Although
the Sons of the Revolution (SAR) was
founded first, in 1889, the appeal to
women was such that soon Daughters
of the Revolution and Colonial Dames
of America “far outnumbered Sons.”
A preponderance of women in the
field gave rise, Morgan writes, to the
stock character of the “chatty old lady,”
the grandmother or spinster aunt who
devoted her spare time and emotional
energies to the collection and organiza-
tion of family lore, sometimes dubbed
“memory work” or “kin work.” As
soon as family trees were seen as a
form of female embroidery, kin workwas derided as “unmanly,” encourag-
ing a split between serious academic
studies and genealogy, which was often
based not on textual documentation
but on names written in family Bibles,
oral history, or stories passed down for
generations. Thus genealogy became
history’s redheaded—and relentlessly
feminized—stepchild.It also became a favorite device of
white supremacists. “Hereditary or-
ganizations and the institutions that
served them, such as libraries and his-
torical societies,” Morgan argues, “ex-
panded whiteness and Americanism”
in a host of ways. She describes the
practice by the DA R and other groups
of installing plaques on boulders or
walls preserving the names and birth-
dates of the first white babies born in
a given locale, a weird corollary to the
Confederate monuments that sprang
up in the early years of the twentieth
century.
During an era when Teddy Roosevelt
and other nationalists feared that white
Anglo- Saxons, whose birth rates ap-
pear to have lagged during the 1800s,
were committing “race suicide,” hered-
itary organizations devoted themselves
to policing racial purity. The DA R
banned “colored” women by statute in
1894, the same year as the founding of
the United Daughters of the Confed-
eracy, a group that, as Morgan dryly
notes, “hardly needed a stated ban.”
The DA R’s “lineage books” document-
ing members’ white pedigree (it pro-
duced 160 volumes between 1895 and
1938) were used in protecting against
slurs and rumors. When Warren G.
Harding ran for president in 1920,
Republicans cited his SAR member-
ship and a family tree “bundled,” says
Morgan, “with with ‘pallid, full- page
portraits of his mother and father’” to
battle rumors of mixed- race ancestry.
He won in a landslide.
After W. E. B. Du Bois collected
and submitted evidence to the SAR to
prove his relatedness to a revolutionary
soldier, he gained admittance to the
Massachusetts chapter but was rejected
by the national organization, which
feared he might “repel white southern-
ers from joining the Sons.” In the most
moving chapter of Morgan’s book, she
recounts Du Bois’s decision, as the
editor of the periodical The Crisis: A
Record of the Darker Races (launched
in 1910 by Du Bois and other members
of the National Association for the Ad-
vancement of Colored People), to pub-
lish a children’s issue in 1914 featuring
eighty- nine photographs of babies and
young children, submitted by readers
and identified only by their state of res-
idence. The images, a few reproduced
by Morgan, capture pride and anxiety
expressed through bows, ribbons, and
ruffles:The photographs show... cherubs
and schoolchildren who were pain s -
tak ingly dressed in white or light-
colored clothing, carefully groomed,
and generally Black or mixed- race.
The older children’s toys, bicy-
cles, and schoolbooks positioned
them far from child labor, whichPhotographs from W. E. B. Du Bois’s monthly, The Crisis, October 1916Fraser 23 25 .indd 23 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 53 PM