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. ''
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. ''
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.
His own political party refused the catastrophic Pierce renomination. Pierce backed
schemes to spread slavery by having mercenaries, called `` filibusters, '' invade Mexico,
Central America and the Caribbean 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 England families 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 oligarchic
tradition? For a clue, let us look at the case of Arthur Burr Darling, George Bush's prep
school history teacher.