Nepotism defended
Ideas
`No person connected with me by blood or marriage will be appointed to office," declared the 19th U.S. president, Rutherford B. Hayes. His firm stand against nepotism was one way he hoped to clean up Washington after the corruption-filled administration of his predecessor, Ulysses S. Grant.
But nepotism has never been easy to banish from American public life--or, for that matter, from other American pursuits. Even the Founding Fathers, despite their opposition to hereditary privileges, found ways to advance their relatives' careers in public office. And no recent political figure has matched John F. Kennedy, who appointed his own brother Robert as attorney general.
Today, with the Oval Office occupied by the son of a former president and the grandson of a senator, many observers charge that politics in Washington is again becoming a family affair. True, most forms of outright family cronyism were brought to an end by a 1967 federal antinepotism statute and other reforms. But a goodly number of relatives by blood or marriage hold prominent posts not only within the same branches of government but across different ones. And a rapidly expanding network of relatives connects the offices of Congress with the lobbying shops of K Street.
To be sure, there is nothing illicit about the way in which Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president's daughter, became a deputy assistant secretary of state. And no law bars Sen. Tom Daschle's wife, Linda, from working for a lobbying firm. But the British-born pundit Andrew Sullivan is not alone in suggesting that these and other cases are a "worrisome sign that America's political class is becoming increasingly insular."
One person who is emphatically unworried is Adam Bellow. His new and distinctly contrarian book, In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History, is a forthright polemic wrapped in an anthropological and historical examination of a subject that has been curiously neglected in the annals of scholarship. (The only other book-length study of the subject is a 17th-century Italian treatise on papal politics, Il Nipotismo di Roma.) Bellow has two related aims. He wants to show that nepotism, in various forms, is universal and irresistible throughout history and across all human cultures. And he wants to make the case that a distinct form of "meritocratic nepotism"--which has developed over centuries and which tempers family advantage with demonstrated ability--is not only consistent with the ideals of our meritocratic democracy but, when openly acknowledged and legally restrained, beneficial to its functioning.
Checks and balances. "I'm not saying we should get rid of obstructions to nepotism," Bellow said in an interview. "I am trying to show that the way it is pursued today does include many checks and balances--legal, psychological, and cultural. I am saying there is a distinction we are not making between good and bad nepotisms." Drawing those distinctions, he claims, will allow us to get over much of the needless hypocrisy that surrounds the subject. And it may even help us to see that the return of such things as "public-service dynasties"--think of the first father-son presidential duo, John Adams and John Quincy Adams--can be a good thing.
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.
This story appears in the July 21, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.