Nepotism defended
Ideas
It could be said that Bellow, 46, comes to his subject by birth. The son of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, he acknowledges that he got his start in the publishing world (he is now editor at large at Doubleday) by dint of his father's reputation and connections. But like all beneficiaries of the new nepotism, he says, he had to live up to his advantages and prove his worth.
To show how western societies arrived at the new nepotism, Bellow ranges from the insights of evolutionary psychology and anthropology through the political practices of tribes, clans, and family-based kingdoms and empires. In his account, the turning point in attitudes toward nepotism came in Greece in 509 B.C., when the Athenian ruler Cleisthenes replaced the four tribes of his city-state with 10 new ones, formed not by blood ties but by residence. "Thus was born the concept of a state based on territory and individual citizenship rather than on descent and tribal affiliation," Bellow writes. The importance of family did not disappear. But politics, in the true sense, emerged--and with it, the public sphere.
By far the richest part of Bellow's story is his reading of American history through the prism of nepotism. In addition to showing how founders like Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin used their influence to secure posts for their kin, Bellow provides pocket biographies of such figures as Abraham Lincoln to reveal how even the most supposedly self-made of individuals relied on family connections to rise in the world. (By wooing and marrying Mary Todd, Lincoln acquired a valuable family bond with a powerful Illinois political clique, the Springfield Junto.)
But there is also a broader, ever continuing social-political saga that Bellow relates. It is one in which different groups and their elites vie for supremacy, whether southerners versus northerners, yeoman farmers versus commercial grandees, or upstart Irish immigrants versus New York WASPs or Boston brahmins. In this story, the role of family connections and influence is as inevitable as, and indeed part of, the strategies of patronage and cronyism that secure the interests of contending groups.
Laws, civil service reforms, and other measures--not only in government but also in business, the professions, and academia--have, of course, attempted to constrain and minimize the excesses of nepotism and other forms of patronage. And such laws, Bellow says, are mostly to the good. But often the reforms intended to create equal opportunity have had perverse effects. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act did break up racial and ethnic monopolies in trade unions, for example. But when union members could no longer advance their own relatives, unions often became far less important or useful to their working-class constituencies.
Conversely, the better off are often more successful at getting around or reversing antinepotism measures. Feminists, for one, have led the way in removing many of the antinepotistic barriers in academia and other professions, where they had the effect of keeping out wives: Many law firms and universities have now dropped restrictions against the hiring of spouses on the grounds that they are prejudicial.
Bellow's assault on the conventional wisdom about nepotism is already drawing critics. "I don't think we need a full-throated endorsement of nepotism," says Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington nonprofit. "Our eyebrows should raise a little when we hear about a relative being appointed to a big position." Still, Lewis applauds Bellow's attempt to examine what he calls the "last taboo in America." And whether one agrees with it or not, his book is a provocative invitation to a long-overdue debate.
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