Relative Power

Another way to look at the predominance of the relative few is the "small pool" theory. The reason you keep seeing the same names over and over in the early years of the republic is because there were fewer worthies to choose from. "You have this narrow set of aristocratic families -- the draw was minuscule -- this narrow set of educated people who had the time and leisure to engage in politics in a young country where most people were just trying to feed themselves," says Edward Renehan Jr., historian and author of "The Lion's Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and His Family in Peace and War." Plus, Renehan says, "You couldn't have the riffraff running things."

"Some colonies before the revolution did have a ruling elite," says Jack Rakove, Stanford University historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution." Especially in the South, with its planter aristocracy.

But there was a wariness, too, says Rakove, an instinct to counterbalance the weight of ancestry. "The founders were united in their attitude that political office should not be transmitted from one family or passed down through the generations," Rakove says.

As an example, Rakove points to the founders' chilly reception of the Society of the Cincinnati, one of America's premier hereditary associations (with its headquarters today in Dupont Circle). The society was formed in 1783 by former officers of the Continental Army and was named for the dictator Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who served Rome during a time of war, then returned power to the Senate and went home to plow his fields. Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were critical of the group in which membership was passed down to sons and included no enlisted men. "It implied a founding generation," Rakove says, "a military aristocracy with a hereditary principle, and there was deep bias from the revolution against the idea that political power should be passed on." (Nevertheless, the reception wasn't so chilly as to prevent George Washington from serving as the society's first president.)

David Kennedy, Stanford historian and co-author of the popular high school textbook "The American Pageant," reminds us that the founders "were not wild believers in all-out democracy. They were quite wary of what we know of as democracy now. They rejected the monarch. But they also believed in the rule of the best men. The electoral college is a vestige of that, and so is the Senate," two institutions devised to restrain unbridled democracy.

As for politics as family affair, Kennedy (no relation to those Kennedys) says the founders "were friendly to it and understood it. They expected that 'nature's aristocrats' or 'the first families of Virginia,' as they would be called, would take up their proper roles. People would not have remarked upon it as anomalous at the time."

Among the first and most prominent political families were the Adamses, though David McCullough, author of "John Adams," the book that inspired the upcoming HBO series on the second president (played by Paul Giamatti), bristles at the suggestion that the word "dynasty" be applied to his beloved Adams family.

Why? Because they aren't a dynasty "in the real meaning of the word," he says. Though John Adams's son, John Quincy Adams, did become the sixth president (and his son Charles Francis Adams was a member of Congress and ambassador to Britain), McCullough feels the word implies a certain unseemliness. "The children and grandchildren of the Adams family were raised with the idea that public service was expected of you. John Adams, he never ignored the call to duty. To his financial detriment, with a threat of his life, to his marriage."

McCullough asks, "Is that a worthy tradition in a family? To raise their children to serve. It was not held as a handicap or something to be suspicious of." But would the nation have been better served had son not followed father in the White House? McCullough thinks not. "John Quincy Adams was a very great man," McCullough says. "He wasn't an important president. He wasn't the greatest president. But he wasn't a bad president."

McCullough is now thundering a bit on the telephone. "He is the only president who, after serving as president, went back to serving in the House of Representatives, which has never happened before or since, where he was battling slavery day after day after day, as an old man, tired, put upon. They called him 'Old Man Eloquence.' But what he said mattered. He died there. He died with his boots on."

By the time John Quincy Adams became the sixth president in 1825, the idea that great families owed a great debt had gone out of fashion a bit, confronted by the rise of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and the more inclusive "Jacksonian democracy," which legitimizes people from humble origins, Kennedy says.

"You can have the backwoods bastard hick, from the fabled log cabin," says Kennedy. "In fact, the log cabin becomes a proxy for humble origins." He points out that today a candidate of meager birth is likely to trumpet the fact. "I'm the son of a millworker," John Edwards has said more than once. Similarly, Barack Obama tells an inspiring story of his rise from adversity. "You can be a Roosevelt," Kennedy says, a scion of wealth, an heir to a great name, "but you have to be a tribune of the people."