Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1993 by Stuart M. Blumin

Mid-way through Lives in Trust, antrhopologist George E. Marcus explains the origin of the book's central argument. Having embarked on an ethnographic study of dynastic families in Galveston, Texas, Marcus observed what he took to be a limiting paradox in existing dynastic scholarship. Authors of dynastic sagas, he tells us, typically gather most of their facts from the periphery of the dynastic family, interviewing corps of friends, servants, and associates, tirelessly reading in family, business, and foundation archives, but rarely depending in any crucial way upon interviews with family members themselves; approaching them, indeed, in a manner that is "hedged and restrained," and learning little from them. Yet, in the narratives that result, "the families appear recentered, . . . as if the writer had been at the center of family process." So, Marcus concluded, "why not write an account of the dynasty that reflected the paths of learning about it, that reflected its decentered existence? This would at least break through the authoritative narrative in which the family story unto itself is central and privileged ..." (p. 162). This curiously postmodern concern with the relation between the process and the object of investigation is at once the strength and the weakness of Marcus's book. It is its strength because it leads to what seem to me genuine and significant discoveries about American dynasties. It is its weakness because both the epistemological-dramaturgical notion that the object of study ought to be represented in a manner reflective of the "paths of learning about it," and the specific proposition about the decentered natured of American dynasties, are themselves limiting and problematic.

Marcus's principal insight is that American dynasties, in general, rapidly evolve into complex institutions in which the descendants of the family founder play an increasingly marginal and sometimes antagonistic role vis a vis the various outsiders - lawyers, trust managers, accountants, investment advisors, corporate and foundation executives , and the like - who are brought into the dynasty to manage the family fortune. The first four chapters of the book (which, like most of the others, are previously published essays tailored slightly and ordered to present as coherent a progression as possible) articulate various patterns of dynastic decentering, analyzing in detail the emergence of non-family fiduciaries as dynastic managers; the characteristic relations of the founder's children, grandchildren, and more remote descendants to each other, to the fiduciaries, and to the dynasty as a whole; the specific role of the generation-skipping trust as the principal instrument for shaping relations within the dynasty; the usual arc of dynastic formation and dissolution (spanning about a century); and a host of other matters pertaining to the dynasty as an institution. Formal structures fade into issues of ethos and sensibility in the following five chapters, where Marcus focuses with sympathetic insight on the conflicted relation of dynastic descendants to both their fortunes and their families. Earlier, Marcus had made the interesting observation that the strongest and least ambiguous commitment to the perpetuation of the dynasty is often expressed by the non-family fiduciaries, who perceive the dynasty in terms of the fortune and its institutional embodiment in businesses, trusts, and charitable foundations. To descendants, though, the dynasty is a problem not merely of institutional management (with which they may or may not be involved) but also of self-definition. They, unlike the fiduciaries, respond to it both as a fortune and as a family - their family, which, by insisting on its collective sacredness, its particular character and style, and on the importance of its perpetuation, threatens to subdue their individual selves, a personal dilemma made more difficult by the location of the dynasty within a culture that magnifies the significance of the self. "The dynastic family," writes Marcus, "is one of the very few settings, perhaps the only one, in American society where the cultural production of the person and that of the group are equally and powerfully matched, entwined, and simultaneously in competition. It is certainly the only setting in which there is a complex effort to give a priority to the reality of collectivity over the unique, autonomous selves of its members" (p. 180). Fiduciaries are spared this agonizing competition between the dynasty and the self, and the fact that the portrait of the founder looms differently and less consequentially over lawyers and investment advisors than over children and grandchildren accounts in no small measure for - indeed, constitutes the deepest meaning of - the "decentering" of the dynasty. Marcus seems almost relieved to report that some American dynasties collapse into their empty centers, dissolving their trusts and other collective vestiges into individual (and much smaller) inheritances, thereby allowing all subsequent descendants to merge "anonymously into the middle class" (p. 43).