The ‘typically’ American Boston Brahmins : Vanam Jwala Narasimha Rao

The ‘typically’ American Boston Brahmins

Vanam Jwala Narasimha Rao

The Hans India (31-07-2017)

On seeing the “Brahmin” brand ladies’ handbags in a mall in the San Francisco (USA) shopping centre, my curiosity took to me to find out whether there is a reference to Brahmin in USA. One of my FB friend gave a hint about Boston Brahmin. Here is some juicy backgrounder that is interesting and outright enjoyable.   

The term Brahmin refers to the highest-ranking caste of people in the traditional caste system in India, is perhaps, what we all, the Indians, know. But in the United States, it has been applied to the old, wealthy New England families of British Protestant origin which were influential in the development of American institutions and culture. While some 19th-century Brahmin families of large fortune were of bourgeois origin, others were of aristocratic origin.

The Boston Brahmin or Boston elite are members of Boston's traditional upper class. They form an integral part of the historic core of the East Coast establishment, along with other wealthy families of Philadelphia, New York City, Virginia and Charleston.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr who was a lieutenant in the Harvard brigade and belongs to Boston, coined the phrase Boston Brahmin in 1861 in his novel Elsie Venner, describing Boston’s aristocracy as the ‘Brahmin Caste of New England.’ They believed destiny had set them apart to create a shining city on a hill. Many Brahmin families had made their fortunes as merchants and financiers before Holmes published his novel. If you hadn’t made your money by then, the only way into the caste was to marry into it.

Some Brahmins were already wealthy when they arrived in the early 17^th century. Sociologist Harriet Martineau visited Boston in the 1830s and concluded its Brahmins were 'perhaps as aristocratic, vain, and vulgar a city, as described by its own "first people," as any in the world.'

TS Eliot in his poem “The Boston Evening Transcript” gently mocks the Brahmin caste to which he belonged (though his family moved to St. Louis). The Transcript published from 1830 to 1941, was the paper of record and a Brahmin favourite with book reviews, music criticism, a college sports page, a bridge department and a genealogy column.

There are also Brahmins by marriage, though originally, they are not. Isabella Stewart Gardner was a Brahmin by virtue of her marriage to John Lowell Gardner, Jr. John Forbes Kerry is a classic example of Brahmin by marriage. John Forbes Kerry is an American politician who served as the 68th United States Secretary of State from 2013 to 2017. A Democrat, he previously served Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1985 to 2013.

The Boston Brahmin is expected to maintain the customary English reserve in his dress, manner, and deportment, cultivate the arts, support charities such as hospitals and colleges, and assume the role of community leader.

The Brahmin Families include such names as Adams, Armory, Appleton, Bradlees, Coffin etc. among others. The Boston Brahmins refer to many prominent Boston families, so there's no one answer as to "what happened" to them. Many of their descendants are still highly influential, especially in the world of politics like John Kerry--member of the Forbes family, Lincoln Chafee.

The Boston Brahmins supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning. The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Thinkers, poets, writers Emerson, Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell were referred to as Boston Brahmins for their occidental thoughts borrowed from India.

Charles Jackson who lived during 1775–1855 and was a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, Amelia Lee Jackson, who married Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, Patrick Tracy Jackson who lived between 1780–1847 and co-founder of the Boston Manufacturing Company and Hannah Jackson wife of Francis Cabot Lowell were some of the prominent Boston Brahmins.