Diary Of A Modern Overlord - The Myth Of Social Equality

Everyone knew that Harrison Alcott was a man of intellectual means - a master of ten languages, entrepreneur, Lothario and bedder of more women than the harem of a Turkish pasha, traveler, gourmet, and fashion icon.  Was there nothing that he couldn't do? Anything that was beyond his reach? Anything  farfetched or beyond belief? 

 

Harrison was a child of wealth and privilege - old money, the cultured money of Revere silver, Chippendale highboys, Tiffany lamps, and Townsend chairs; the money of the Vineyard, Rimini, and Gstaad.  'Be all you can be' was an irrelevancy for the likes of Harrison Alcott. In his 'being' there would never be a hard row to hoe, no bootstraps to pull up, no Sisyphean rock to climb.  He was all he would be from the moment of his birth. 

He commanded attention, demanded loyalty already given because of some innate sense of authority.  Alcotts had always owned others and ruled more.  Harrison's great-great grandfather had been the owner of Barker's Rise, a Mississippi delta plantation of a thousand acres of prime Egyptian cotton worked by fifteen hundred prize Angolan slaves.  His great grandfather was a Boston and Newport shipowner who profited from the Three Cornered Trade of African chattel and Caribbean molasses. 

'Alcotts work for no one' was the inscription in the family Bible, followed by 'We own things', surprising for what should have been, 'Except for God Almighty', and those descendants who had read the prophetic words were unapologetic, for they too had owned things and people without regret, guilt, or second thoughts. 

Captain Isaiah Alcott was the captain of a New England whaler which plied the Southern Ocean and returned to Nantucket with enough oil to light the town for year and enough ambergris to scent Boston's finest ladies for years to come.  No one was ever lost on the Augustus, a ship run with iron discipline and unflinching economy, and sail after sail the ship was the prince of the northern fleet. 

Bernard Alcott was a captain of industry, second only to J.D. Rockefeller in oil exploration and refining and the first investor in the new Wall Street bank of J.P. Morgan.  His son, Phillips Alcott ran his fathers earnings into the tens of millions in stock futures and canny off-market investments; and his father, H.F. Alcott was a master of creative financial instruments. 

Each of the Alcott men owned things and people.  Although the days of slavery and the lucrative trans-Atlantic slave trade were long gone, later Alcotts owned investors, employees, and speculators.  Ownership was a birthright, a God-given gift of power and authority. 

Alexander Hamilton knew as much - that is, he understood the legacy of breeding and, despite the populist objections of his colleague Thomas Jefferson and his touting of democracy and citizen rule, he knew that America's elite would always determine the new republic's future.  The Alcotts were beneficiaries of Hamiltonian aristocratic convictions; and bred in economic and financial nobility helped create the new nation. 

 

Slavery was not so much a matter of involuntary servitude but an example of profitable ownership. The new republic was about enterprise and capitalist principles, and slavery, despite the moral objections to it, was a prime example of them.  It mattered not to the Alcotts whether or not slavery was an immoral enterprise.  It was permitted, encouraged, and protected in independent America, and the Alcott family profited immensely.

The early Twentieth Century Alcotts, the claques and rising stars of the Robber Baron era, followed suit.  The thousands of immigrants on the assembly lines of their industrial enterprises were neo-slaves, little different from their African brothers only thanks to a desultory right to vote.  The Alcotts were modern masters and overlords. 

For Harrison Alcott, all this was academic muddle, organizing the obvious with predictable fallacies. He and his family were born to lead, just as millions of families were born to follow.  Democracy is not hurt by the implications of this notion, only strengthened.  Despite howling and breast-beating, class distinctions will always be a part of society as they have been since the Paleolithic. Those destined to lead will lead. 

 

Elitism, privilege, historical legacy will remain despite attempts to expunge, censor, and marginalize them, and thank God for their resistance and longevity. 

And so it was that latter-day Alcotts continued the tradition of ownership, and by so doing consolidated the family ethos of rule, governance, and authority.  It was in their blood.  The portraits on the walls of the Alcott homestead were reminders of this legacy. 

Harrison Alcott extended his inheritance beyond mere finance and economics. He controlled women, brought them easily within his sexual administration, and assembled a harem of female devotees worthy of an emir. 

The women were free to leave but never did. Sexual bondage in an early twenty-first century context was far different than the enforced concubinage of centuries past.  It meant only emotional fealty - the women in Harrison's 'household' were tabled because of desire. At the sexual beck and call of a modern-day pasha had its own deeply psychological appeal. 

Harrison was especially noteworthy and unique because of the era in which he lived - a censorious, neo-Puritanical, neo-Soviet age of preposterous inclusivity.  The very fact that this antithesis of 'diversity', this Nietzschean Übermensch, could exist in a culture of raging social fantasy was unique in and of itself. 

There were a few who interpolated Alcott family history and placed it well within the social bell curve - on one far asymptote while the mass of unwitting Americans were in the soggy middle - but they had to admit the disproportionate power of the asymptotes.  The Alcotts, as far they might be from the norm, would always rule the rest. 

Darwin, in his seminal work on evolution wrote about supremacy - the natural, innate drive for dominance and perpetuation of the species and the existential wars to determine genetic future.  Social Darwinism, discredited by progressive Utopians, best describes the ascent and longevity of the Alcotts - a family with social and intellectual rights and the strength and determination to continue them.  The Alcotts, as long as they retain their commitment, their purpose, and their legacy will always rule.