I think what US had over others, and I believe still has, is that you don't need to rely on your class, your tribe, your clan, or your family in order to survive and even get ahead.
I won't deny that it's often easier to survive and get ahead if you have those connections, but not being part of a favored group by birth doesn't doom you to penury, doesn't reduce you to an outcast, or an outcaste.
No Dalits in America.
No lords, either.
The richest people in America are entrepreneurs, or their progeny.
Sure, the people who sneer for a living are sneering at the Crystal Bridges art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, built by Sam Walton's daughter, Alice, but by all reports it's actually a very good art museum. We are planning on a visit soon.
crystalbridges.org
I know for a fact, living in the DC metro area, that most of the really good art museums here were founded by or funded by "robber barons" and their progeny.
And nobody was born a robber baron. To a man, they were born not knowing how to dress for dinner or which fork to use when they did sit down to dinner. Which never stopped them from amassing heaping piles of riches, and then endowing not just art museums, but universities and medical schools and foundations, after they made their pile in real estate, railroads, steel mills, oil, finance, retail.
The progeny, well, they can pretend to be gentlemen and gentlewomen, too good for "trade". Nobody agrees, of course, especially not the down-at-the-heels progeny of "real" gentlemen and gentlewomen, whose parents haven't had a pot to piss in for generations.
And that's the beauty of America. |
