Mayflower descendants are (mostly) not snobs.

They're not particularly rich, either. Look at me with the seasonal content.

Mayflower descendants: perception (left) and reality (right)

I.

At some point in the last eighty years or so, “my ancestors came over on the Mayflower” became cultural shorthand for snobby, upper-crust exclusivity. There you are in Starbucks, sipping your latte, writing your script, and you need to quickly communicate that a character is a pompous jerk. It’s a go-to. Make your bad guy a member of the Mayflower society. Have another character offhandedly comment that their “people came over on the Mayflower.” Then, if your intended audience is really slow on the uptake, give the character a silly, affected name, like Howland Billington Brewster, IV.

But that’s wrong. It’s a bad trope. It’s as dramatically out-of-date as a Billy Beer joke, maybe even moreso. Let’s be systematic. There are two kinds of Mayflower descendants. Those who know it and those who don’t. And those groups can be further subdivided. Those whose ancestors knew it, and those who didn’t.

See here:

I prefer Paul’s solo version on Anthology.

Anyway.

Let’s start from the green group. It’s almost certainly the largest group. The world is full of Mayflower descendants who don’t know it. Think about it. These pilgrims came over on a boat in 1620. Many died, but those who did not were very fertile. The General Society of Mayflower Descendants estimates there are upwards of 35 million descendants today. First of all, that’s not a very exclusive group. Most of those descendants have no idea. Maybe their ancestors left southeastern Massachusetts (Mayflower territory) for upstate New York in the early 1800s. Then they flowed into Michigan in the mid-1800s. Then they married some Germans, then they married some Scandinavians, then McKinsey sent them to Singapore to work on supply line logistics and they married a Singaporean. Maybe their kid is you. You have no idea you are a Mayflower descendant. But you could be descended from half the ship six ways from Sunday. Sure, you’re a snob. But it’s because your parents are McKinsey partners and you’ve lined up an exclusive internship in the publishing industry, not because of your proud descent from Miles Standish.

Then think about your second cousins back in Michigan. Salt of the earth types. Definitely not snobs. All Mayflower descendants.

Now let’s move to the blue group. Mayflower descendants who do know it, but whose great-grandparents did not. We have a word for these people: genealogists. Not snobs. Real genealogists cannot be snobs about ancestry because they know the (stylized) truth. Everyone is descended from everyone. When it comes to ancestors, there’s nothing to be snobby about.

The red group contains most of the bona fide snobs. If Lovey Howell were real she’d fall in this group.¹ Your great-grandparents knew they were Mayflower descendants and so do you. Great-grandma probably joined the Mayflower Society in its Gilded Age heyday, when much casual genealogical interest was motivated by naked class and status anxiety. Old money helplessly stood by as parvenus like the Rockefeller and Vanderbilts lapped them many times over. Well, your great-grandparents may have been mere hundred-thousandaires,² but they had something better, something money can't buy: pedigree.³

So there is a very good chance your great-grandparents were snobs. They probably had money to spare, because they probably paid someone to put together their application package. And they lived in a time where to be an “old stock” American was truly a mark of societal distinction, sufficient to separate you not only from the teeming hordes yearning to breathe free, but also from the short-fingered vulgarians building faux-chateaus on Fifth Avenue.⁴

Now, are you a snob as their great-grandchild? Probably not. But to my mind the reasons for that are complicated. In 2022, snobbery about one’s ancestors is fusty and old-fashioned, itself a target of snobby condescension. It’s embarrassing, a pale stand-in for the real signifiers of cultural status: education, place of residence, follower count. Put simply, nobody cares that your great-grandfather went to Yale and they certainly don’t care that your ancestor was Elihu Yale. But you went to Yale? That’s putting some points on the board.

Finally, what about that yellow box? Your great-grandparents knew, but you don’t? Most likely you just don’t care about genealogy.⁵ But for most people, great-grandparents lived a long, long time ago, and all sorts of familial chasms can open up between 1900 and 2022.

My point here is that Hollywood’s cultural signifiers are about eighty years past their prime. They made sense for the Marx Brothers. They were a little creaky when John Hughes stood atop the box office. But they’re a dead metaphor now. Mayflower descent does not confer social status because (1) it is too large a descent group; and (2) ancient descent doesn’t confer status, period. At best, it is a stand-in for descent from a people of social prominence one hundred years ago.

II.

So much for snobbery. What about power and wealth? Is the Mayflower really the best cultural symbol, even back at the height of the WASP ascendancy? It’s really not. Plymouth Colony was politically marginalized almost as soon as Winthrop landed at Massachusetts Bay. Plymouth and its satellite settlements very quickly became a backwater. Look at the founding generation. The signers of the Declaration of Independence make for a good proxy for political power.

Of the Massachusetts signers (Adams, Adams, Gerry, Hancock, Paine) only Robert Treat Paine had a Plymouth Colony background. The other four came from Massachusetts Bay territory and Massachusetts Bay ancestry. John Adams was a descendant of Mayflower passengers John and Priscilla (Mullins) Alden, it’s true. But their daughter Ruth (Adams’ great-grandmother) married into a Braintree family and left Plymouth.

Look at Van Wyck Brooks’ Flowering of New England. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorn, Fuller, the Lowells—every last one of them are Massachusetts Bay people. Think of the Boston Brahmin families: Lowell again, Cabot, Saltonstall, Appleton, Crowninshield. Not only are these Massachusetts Bay names, they are all Essex County, Massachusetts names, a vestige of the early breakaway prosperity of seaport towns like Salem and Newburyport. Amongst the mandarins and aristocrats of the American apex, Mayflower names are comparatively rare. No presidents or vice-presidents carried Mayflower names (though of course several have been descendants). No sitting federal judges. No recent presidential cabinet members. No U.S. Supreme Court justices ever except Melville Fuller. Of this list of American billionaires: zero.⁶ You get the picture.

Yes, raw numbers are playing a big part here. Roughly 20,000 settlers came to New England, of whom the greatest part went to Massachusetts Bay or its daughter colonies. Immigration to Plymouth played a relatively minor role, and within that, the Mayflower passengers numbered a mere 102.

But raw numbers are as good a reason as any. The Mayflower passengers were swamped. The future belongs to those who show up. And while the Mayflower descendants certainly showed up, the exponential fruitfulness of their neighbors crowded them out. The Mayflower is a symbol. At one point it was a symbol of religious liberty, of Northern (vs. Southern) heritage, of American exceptionalism. Of late, it’s mainly a symbol of inherited privilege.

That dubious honor, like the presupposed privilege, is largely unearned.⁷

1. The character’s maiden name is Wentworth, a prominent Massachusetts Bay Colony name, so it’s not guaranteed.

2. Not bad for 1900.

3. That’s wrong; money buys pedigree all the time. You just marry it.

4. Of course there was a “Holland Society,” for which Vanderbilt and probably Rockefeller would have qualified . But everybody knows it’s not as good.

5. Weirdo.

6. As to the broader WASP overclass, there are a few, but not as many as you might suppose. The Johnsons of Fidelity Investments, the unrelated Johnsons of Franklin Templeton, the still unrelated Johnsons of Johnson & Johnson, and Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix.

7. That said, I’d welcome a study showing that the average Mayflower descendant has a higher net worth than the average American. But that data set would be very difficult to put together. You can’t rely on membership in lineage societies as a proxy, because of course people who join lineage societies have a higher net worth on average. Who else would have the disposable income to spend on a frivolity? But there’s no centralized database of Mayflower descendants. This isn’t Iceland. The closest equivalent (internet family trees + the “silver books” published by the Mayflower Society) is half garbage data. The silver books are great, though.