In an earlier blog I mentioned that I was still fighting against private clubs, the key mechanism of the hereditary elite class, well into the 1970s. This despite the fact that the hereditary elite class in America was already disappearing by the early 1960s as we can see from the disappearance of the blue books of that era.
Which is to point out that the end of the hereditary class in America was a slow moving glacier. It was not obvious to me at the time. It became obvious by the end of the 1970s when the private clubs in San Francisco were desperately seeking new members from anywhere. The debutantes ball as an elite function had been long dead.
I have consistently attributed the end of the hereditary elite class in America to the promotions into the officer class during the WWII and the extraordinary development of native talents by the military. All of which prepared an entire generation with the skills needed in business in the postwar era. The hoi polloi then rose to the top ranks of business and displaced the hereditary elite.
I may not have given sufficient credit to the practice, beginning in the 1950s, of admitting ordinary human beings to the elite colleges and doing it deliberately. By the time I attended the University of Chicago in 1955 most elite schools were recruiting from the West Coast and from middle-class neighborhoods. I was also recruited by Harvard but had no interest in going in that ‘snooty’ direction which was very visible to me at the time.
The slow moving glacier, eliminating America's hereditary class is itself an interesting phenomenon.
As late as 1969, the son of a bank president, himself a member of the elite club world asked me how my fellow bankers would react to his marrying a beautiful young Chinese American. I explained to him that the emerging hippie society would slowly change the larger society and that his actions might become acceptable but that I didn't think it would be acceptable to his parents yet.
I didn't sense the rapid change that was occurring in attitudes toward children of the hereditary elite. His parents might not have minded, considering the social collapse they saw happening around them.
The hereditary elite was in full power in America in 1955 and was completely gone by 1975. A very short period to transition for everyone in that class. They went from having access to each other to no one even knowing who the others were.