The Constitution could not be more specific: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Yet, in the nearly two centuries since these words were written, the American people, despite official disapproval, have chosen a political elite resembling a nobility in everything but name. And it is far more than a matter of a few Roosevelts and Adamses.

Twenty-two families—among them the Bayards (below), the Muhlenbergs, and the Washburns (next page)—have sent four or more sons to Congress. An astonishing total of 700 families have sent two or more, accounting for nearly 1,700 of the 10,000 men and women elected to the federal legislature since 1774. Currently, seventeen United States senators are in some manner connected with dynasties.

Who are these “people’s dukes,” as Stewart Alsop calls them?

Most frequently, as the March Hare said, they are the “best butter”: old stock, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, professional, eastern seaboard, well-to-do. Vet, as the Kennedys have dramatically illustrated, being Celtic or Catholic is hardly disqualifying. And only a half-century ago the Longs of Louisiana were poor dirt farmers; today their ancestry includes two governors, three senators, and three congressmen. (The Long family is examined at greater length in the accompanying article.)

The wealth of most political dynasties, as might be expected of old families, generally has come from the land. First they planted it; later they sold it. Rarely, however, have the dynasties been immensely wealthy. Since a high birth rate has been a dynastic characteristic, their money has often been dissipated through dispersion. As for the Very Rich, there have been no Astors, Vanderbilts, or Goulds in Congress (although lately a profusion of Rockefellers have entered public life). Yet if office-holding was beneath the ken of Ward McAllister’s “Four Hundred,” great fortunes have not been averse to having their daughters marry politicians, thus suggesting the second major source of dynastic income.

At least five major political clans can trace the bulk of their wealth directly to advantageous marriages. The correspondence of Presidents John and John Quincy Adams is filled with tales of money miseries; then the latter’s son Charles Francis married the daughter of Boston’s first millionaire, and later Adamses began to write about the debilitating effect of having money!

Any Almanack de Gotha of America’s political nobility would also have to note the frequency of inter-dynasty marriages—the cross-fertilization of Roosevelts and Livingstons, Livingstons and Lees, Bayards and Livingstons, Bayards and Carrolls, Carrolls and Lees, Lodges and Frelinghuysens. One writer claims that Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were hereditarily joined to ten other presidents of the United States.

What has made some families, generation after generation, run for political office?

Certain traits are generally found in politicians—no matter what their fathers’ professions—for example, ambition, gregariousness, energy, tenacity, often a physical attractiveness.